


so much life

by okaynextcrisis



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-11-13 20:37:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 36
Words: 24,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11192940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okaynextcrisis/pseuds/okaynextcrisis
Summary: a collection of Bill/Laura AU minifics





	1. noir au

The thing about life is, you learn not to be surprised.  

I’d been a cop for ten years the day I walked in on my wife making my partner a little too comfortable in my absence.  That was the day I decided to strike out on my own.  Private eye work isn’t pleasant, but that was what I liked about it.  It kept it in your face: the lies, the betrayals, the sinful selfishness that runs through our veins, every one of us, pumped by what we pretend are our hearts.  Everybody lies, everybody cheats, everybody takes the easy road, every time.  I thought I’d seen it all, heard it all before.

Then I met Laura.

She came into my office, a lousy little room with “Bill Adama, Private Investigator” printed in peeling letters on the door, a slight woman in a conservative suit, red hair pulled in a severe bun, glasses perched on the end of her nose, so obviously out of place it was hard not to laugh.

“I need help,” she said.

I smiled.  I lit a cigarette.

“Everybody does.”

“You don’t understand,” she said.  “I know something, and they’re going to kill me for it.”

I smoked my cigarette.  I let her talk.  It’s not like I had anything better to do, I figured.  I already knew I wouldn’t be taking her case.  A cheating husband, I can work with.  A boss with wandering hands, I can handle.  Crazy, I don’t touch.  And this was as crazy as it comes.

“I work at the New York Public Library,” she said.  (Of course she did.)  “They’re using the library because they need a public place–somewhere people come and go.  They can’t be seen together.  They have a code, I think, using the newspaper rack.  They arrange them out of order.”  

She believed it, I knew that.  That didn’t make it any saner.

“Who does?” I asked wearily.  I wondered if it would be rude to pull out my bottom-drawer Scotch in front of her, and if I cared.

“Scientists from Galactica University,” she said, her green eyes wide behind those glasses.  “I overheard something, about _others_ , from another planet, and an agreement that had to be reached, and a sacrifice to avert a war..” 

She looked at me solemnly.  “The disappearances will start soon, they said.  They said losing a few thousand was better than losing the planet.  They said it was us or them.  I think…I think Mayor Adar is in on it, too.”

It was bullshit, anybody could see that.  A terrible plot by the government?  Shadowy figures, haunting a simple librarian?  Scientists in white coats, out to destroy us all?   _Aliens_ , for Christ’s sake?

I got to my feet.  Startled, so did she.

“I tell you what,” I said, my comforting hand on her arm steering her out the door.  “Let’s give it a month, and if you’re still worried, you give me a call.  I’d hate to charge you for nothing.”

Two weeks later, her body turned up in the river.

I didn’t finish the article.  I lit the paper with the end of my cigarette and let it burn until there was nothing left, just ashes on my desk.  I didn’t want to think about “apparent suicide,” or the headline about the mayor’s reelection, or the few words on the homeless men who suddenly seemed to be missing from the city streets.  I didn’t want to think about tears in green eyes when I shut the door.  I didn’t want to think about seaweed tangled in red hair, porcelain skin ripped and torn, those glasses buried at the bottom of the river.

Maybe I was a coward.

But then, you already knew that.


	2. food network au

“…rules are simple: three chefs each make a meal out of the ingredients in our kitchen, one chef is eliminated by our judges each round, until one is crowned the winner.  I’m your host Gaius Baltar, and you’re watching KNIFED!”

The tension-heightening score will be added in post-production, but they don’t need it to get in the mood today; the first chef is shaking so hard Gaius is afraid she’ll drop her plate.  He hopes not.  He’d like to wrap early; he has dinner plans.  

“Our judges today are Bill Adama, owner of three-Michelin-starred restaurant Maison du Galactique in Paris; Caprica Six, host of Food Network’s highest-rated show, _Cooking with Caprica_ , and Laura Roslin, owner of acclaimed New York molecular gastronomy fusion gastro pub Number Forty Three.”

Gaius waits while the camera pans to the judges’ table: Bill, on the left, already looks unhappy; Laura, on the right, is glowing in the warmth of his ire; Caprica, in the middle, just looks beautiful.  Perhaps it’s her neutrality in the legendary Roslin-Adama Knifed Feud; perhaps it’s the personal lighting director she had written into her contract.  

He winks her; she ignores him.  Probably trying to appear professional, he tells himself.  

“Chef Sharon, what did you prepare for us today?” he coos.

Sharon Valerii comes forward nervously, her tall white chef’s hat quivering on her head.  "Today we–I–have a celeriac purée, with a side of beet foam, topped with shards of angus beef frozen on an anti-griddle.”

Gaius wouldn’t have touched it on a bet.   _Aren’t you jealous that you have to stand by while the judges get to try all that delicious food?_ reporters always ask.  No, Gaius is not.  

He waits while the judges taste the dish.

“I have to appreciate the care and thought you put into this,” Caprica, always the soul of generosity (except, notably, where finding another woman in his bed was concerned) puts in.  

Bill appears to be speechless.  “This…isn’t…food,” he manages at last.  “It’s a crime against the first nomads who dropped their mammoth meat into a fire pit.”

“I’m going to have to disagree with you there, Bill,” Laura interrupts ( _Now there’s a fucking surprise_ , Gaius shouts mentally) her tone suggesting not so much sorrow as outright glee.  “I think the choice to use the beef to garnish the celery is very brave.  I applaud Chef Sharon’s courage in taking on the monolith of culinary history.”

It is unclear whether Chef Sharon is more terrified or baffled by this.  Bill stares Laura down just a beat too long, even for television.  Heat rises in her cheeks as she holds his gaze.   _Just do it already_ , Gaius pleads silently, bored by six seasons of sniping and glaring and sexual tension you could cut with their eponymous knife.  

“Next contestant!” he sings.  

D’Anna Biers comes forward, hands buried in the pockets of her jeans beneath her chef’s jacket.  According to his notes, she is head chef of a vegan deli in Santa Monica; if Sharon hadn’t done so badly, Gaius would have been positive D’Anna would be the first to go.  

“Right, so I made kind of a play on a traditional roast, with mashed potatoes made of beets, gravy made from celery juice, and beef made from cashews,” she informs the judges, proffering a plate bearing an alarming red heap topped with several unpleasant shades of beige.  

Bill stares at D’Anna like she’s just served him a maggot-filled corpse.  Even Laura looks faintly appalled.  

“How creative,” Caprica tries.

Bill turns to Laura.  “You _know_ this is your fault,” he growls.  “If you and your ilk weren’t so heedlessly intent on pushing the boundaries of food towards the increasingly indelible—”

“Me and my _ilk_?” Laura echoes, tossing that gorgeous mane of red hair (that honestly, shouldn’t she have pulled back around all that food?  They don’t pay Gaius enough to bring it up).  “I’m sorry you find new ideas so frightening, Bill; maybe television is too newfangled for you?  Electricity?  Should we be eating by candlelight?”

_Do it on the judges’ table and get me on the cover of People_ , Gaius prays.

No such luck.

“I withdraw my comment,” Bill says sourly.

“Final contestant,” Gaius sighs.

Galen Tyrol steps forward, his hands empty.  “I prepared a classic steak tartare with a celery reduction and a side of beets sautéed in duck fat,” he says.  “Unfortunately, I cut myself slicing the celery, and didn’t realize it until I’d contaminated all three dishes.”

Bill looks like he’s just had to take a loved one off life support.  Laura looks nastily triumphant.  Caprica looks as bored as Gaius feels.

“Thank you, anyway, for your efforts, Chef Galen,” he offers.  “Now, if the chefs would excuse us, the judges have some deliberating to do…”

“I thought they all did a wonderful job,” Caprica begins when the chefs file out.  “Particularly—”

No one is listening.

“You can’t honestly tell me you considered any of that to be food,” Bill challenges Laura, taking his usual position of ‘all of the contestants should be sent home immediately.’

“I’m sorry you miss the 1800s so much, Bill, it must have been such a good time for you,” Laura shoots back.  

Gaius already knows she will cast her vote for whichever contestant offends Bill the most.

“I would take death by cholera over _cashew beef_ any day,” he snaps back. “And another thing—”

Sighing deeply, Gaius motions to his assistant to bring him his phone.  He might as well cancel dinner.  

They’re going to be here all night.

_Again_.


	3. grim reaper au

All day long–as she brushed her teeth in front of the mirror, frowning at the fine lines now taking up permanent residence around her eyes; as she drove to work, abnormally irritated by the delay of stop-and-go rush hour traffic; as she sat in the morning’s school board meeting, unusually brittle about the new year’s budget–Laura had tried to ignore the creeping sensation of time being lost, taken from her, running through her fingers like she was trying to grasp an ocean in her cupped palms.

It was a relief to be back at her desk, safe behind her closed door and gold-plated  _Principal Roslin_ plaque, with only her assistant’s gentle presence and soft voice.  She tried to listen as Billy rattled off her messages, flipping absently through the stack of her mail.

“…Superintendent Cavil called with the usual fear-mongering about parents and the summer reading list, but I don’t really think–”

Laura gasped aloud, her shaking hands clutching a copy of _Searider Falcon_.

It couldn’t have been hidden under her mail pile.  It must have been.

“This book.”  She dropped the weathered hardcover as though snakes were crawling out from between the soft pages, tongues flickering behind fangs.  “Where…where did it come from?”

Billy frowned.  “It was on your desk when I came in this morning.  I thought it was yours.  Should I get rid of it?”

Her heart was beating so loudly she couldn’t believe Billy couldn’t hear it.  

“No…no, thank you, Billy,” she made herself say.  “I think I’ll call Cavil now, if you’ll excuse me.”

Billy looked concerned, but he nodded and got up from chair on the other side of her desk, closing the door quietly behind him.

“You never read it, I take it?” a deep, gravely voice asked.

Laura started, badly.

There was a man in the chair.

Her office was empty.   _Had_ been empty.

He had not come through the door.

Laura tried to smile, gesturing with a trembling hand at the book.  “I bet you thought I’d forgotten about that.”

The man in the dark suit didn’t.  “I bet you _hoped_ I’d forgotten about that.”

Of course she had.  When she had allowed herself to think of it at all.

She cleared her throat.  There was no point, in this moment, in pretending not to be afraid, and yet it seemed more important than ever to try.  Every part of her was shaking.  “Not hoped,” she said carefully.

He shrugged, leaning back in the chair, one bent leg crossed over his knee.  “A deal’s a deal, Laura.”

She nodded.  “Of course.  I understand that.  I don’t suppose there’s any way…any kind of…”

She wasn’t sure what she was asking, but he was already shaking his head regretfully.  

“I’m sorry,” he said.  He sounded as though he was.  “But unless you follow through on our bargain…”  He paused unpleasantly.  “ _Steps_ will have to be taken.  And not just with you.”

“No,” Laura said quickly, the words tumbling over each other.  “No.  Dad and Cheryl and Sandra will be left alone.  That was the deal.  That’s what I agreed to.”

His eyes were unreadable.  “They’ll be allowed to live out their normal lifespans, yes.”

Would they?  She had no way of knowing.  But ten years after the accident, the one that should have been fatal, the Roslins were still alive.  Her father had retired and taken up fishing.  Cheryl had graduated high school.  Sandra had become a mother.  She’d done that.  At least she’d done that much.

She lifted her chin.  “Then let’s get this over with.”

He didn’t move.  “Was it worth it, Laura?  Ten years with your family for the rest of your life?”

He’d asked her that then, when she’d wandered into a bookstore in a daze after the police officers had left her house, when she’d stood, damp and shivering, in front of half-priced hardcovers, and realized a stranger, suddenly beside her, had pulled a book off the shelf and called her by name.

He could fix it, he’d said, paging casually through the book.  He could arrange things.  But there would be a price.

There was, he said, his blue eyes rueful, always a price.

She didn’t have to think about it.  She hadn’t had to think about it then.  “Absolutely.”

She would allow herself no other answer.

He got up, then, slowly, and handed her the book.  His touch was warmer than she’d expected.  “Don’t forget this.”

She clutched the hard edges like a life preserver.  “Where I’m going…will I get to read it?”

“I hope so,” he said.  It sounded as though he did.  “I’ve been waiting a long time to hear what you think.”

When he reached for her again, the world had already gone black.


	4. hgtv au

Laura’s HGTV smile never wavers, and it doesn’t now, even when the wall Bill promised the Baltars could be easily be removed to make their living space open-concept turns out to be load-bearing, and an ill-timed choice of paper over rock makes it her turn to call their clients with the unhappy tidings.

“I have some…news,” she says into the phone, as the camera tightens in on her face. A consummate professional, Laura doesn’t react to the intrusion. The viewers don’t want to think about the cameras.

Laura delivers the bad news swiftly. Bill watches, leaning against the rotted wood of the porch (tomorrow’s project) as she works her way to the punchline.

“We can still give you the open floor plan you want, but it’s going to cost you another ten thousand,” she says, wincing as Gaius Baltar reacts less than gracefully to the hitch in his remodel ambitions.

“How could you realize a wall was holding up the roof only after you tear it down?” their unhappy client demands, his voice carrying all the way to the cameras.

“Sometimes you don’t know till you sledgehammer it,” Bill answers honestly.

Laura narrows green eyes at him, pissed beyond belief, and he laughs aloud. After a moment, so does she.

How do you work with your spouse, Bill is always asked by reporters. How do you not, he wonders most days.

From the phone, the unhappy voice of Gaius Baltar continued to provide the producers with material for the promo. “Does this mean I can’t have my plunge pool?”

At least, Bill figures, the ratings will be good.

Or Laura will kill him, and use his body to hold up the Baltars’ ceiling.


	5. superpowers au

It’s something of a game, when they all gather: who has the best power, and who would trade if they could.

(They can’t.)

Starbuck can come back from the dead, but she envies Apollo’s speed.  One causes unhappiness wherever he wanders, but can’t relieve his own.  Doc can heal, but it cuts him when it isn’t enough.  A woman they all refer to as Madame President can apparently channel her gifts outwards, at the others…but at a certain cost.

There are more, but this is Athena’s first time here.  She sits down near the back, where a man sits alone, nursing a drink.

“What’s your power?” she asks cheerfully.  “I’m still working out what mine is.”

“I see the future,” he says shortly.

“Wow,” Athena says.  Guessing that conversation will stall if left to its own devices, she presses on: “So what power would you want, if you could trade?”

His smile fades, his hollow eyes on Madame President sharing a laugh with Apollo.  “To slow down time.”


	6. platonic bed sharing au

Six days ago, when Laura had decamped to this soggy part of the world to settle her Uncle Richard’s affairs and sell his house, she’d found the steady beat of the rain against the window of her hotel room to be soothing, calming. _I forgot to take my sleeping pills_ , she’d thought sleepily, more than once, already drifting off.  

Now, two days after the floods washed out the road, a day after the water rose high enough that the kitchen was six inches deep in standing water, the sheets of rain slamming against the taped-up windows were somewhat less comforting.

Laura threw off the blanket irritably, shifting as much as her half of the bed would allow.  Her one-third, she corrected mentally.  Someone was taking up more than his fair share.

And it was so _hot_.

When the flood waters had risen, and the lights had flickered ominously, before dimming altogether, Laura had worried about how she would keep warm without heating.  In that moment, it had seemed almost…not good, certainly, but _preferable_ to be cut off from the outside world with another person, and not alone.  Bill Adama was the tenant who’d been renting Uncle Richard’s ranch house for the months he’d spent in the nursing home.  When she’d contacted him, as the executor of her uncle’s estate, he’d been helpful enough to indicate that he wanted to buy the house from her, if she could give him a fair price.  Laura had been almost giddy; how considerate of this Bill to save her the trouble of maintaining the place.  

Of course, that was before hours of negotiations for what he considered a “fair price” resulted in Laura being stranded here, and not at her nice hotel, when the storm hit…and before the leak in the roof (”I’ve been meaning to bring that up,” Bill had remarked as water poured through the ceiling) soaked the couch, making this, Bill’s double bed, the only place either of the them could sleep.

“You’re keeping me up,” Bill mumbled.

Laura shot a glare over her shoulder; in the darkness, it was wasted.  “I’m sorry if I’m inconveniencing you, Bill,” she said sourly.

He moved closer to pat her shoulder sleepily.  “S’okay,” he mumbled.  “I forgive you, Laura.”

The heat was unbearable.  

With all her things back at the hotel, she’d been forced to sleep in an ancient college sweatshirt of Uncle Richard’s and a pair of Bill’s sweatpants.  There might have been something more comfortable she could have chosen, but if Laura Roslin was going to be forced to suffer through this indignity, she was going to do it fully clothed, socks included.

She pushed a tangled curl off her forehead in frustration.

Maybe she could slip off just one…

“Thank you, Bill,” she managed through gritted teeth.

Bill was silent.  

Laura waited.

“Bill?”

Nothing.  Just a soft, gentle exhale close to her ear. 

Had he…had he f _allen asleep?_ With his hand still on her shoulder?  Was it possible that he was managing to sleep peacefully under these circumstances?

Without speaking, she slid her pillow out from under head and thwacked him soundly over the head. It was, without a doubt, the best she’d felt in two days.

Bill blinked at her, confused.  “Laura?”

“Get up,” she commanded, grabbing a flashlight from the windowsill.  “If I’m not sleeping, you’re not sleeping.”


	7. marrying someone else au

Carolanne looked beautiful in her wedding dress.  Her pale blonde hair grazed her shoulders, her skin glowing in the mid-morning light steaming through the stained glass windows of the church where her parents had been married.  The dress was pure snow white, not ivory or cream or champagne, the material tight at the waist and then cascading down to the floor, making a soft rustling sound with every step down the aisle, just barely audible over the soft chords of the wedding march.  Carolanne had worried the color would wash her out, but her mother had been right, Laura decided.  Carolanne looked, more than anyone Laura had ever seen, like a bride.

Bill, waiting at the altar, gave his bow tie a final adjustment, an awkward tug that made it go ever so slightly crooked.  Laura’s fingers itched to fix it for him.  

She pressed her hands together in her lap, and tried to focus on Carolanne’s progression down the aisle.    

She arrived soon enough; her father kissed her cheek, and stepped back.  The best man blinked furiously, less because of emotion, Laura, guessed, than due to last night’s revelries, practically oozing from his pores.  But Carolanne’s eyes weren’t on him; she was looking only at Bill.

Laura blinked quickly, herself, and tried to remember that nothing was really changing.  Bill had been engaged when he had come to work at the paper; he had been engaged when they had argued over column inches and word choice; he had been engaged when both of their names appeared together on a byline for the first time.  Carolanne and her dress and this church had been inevitable, decided, set in stone since the day they had met.

And yet…

The officiant mouthed words about loyalty and honor and till death do us part, and Laura tried not to think about fierce blue eyes or rough hands moving impatiently over hers on a keyboard or the warmth of his body as he’d lean over her desk when they worked on a piece together.  

_I do_ , Carolanne said, her voice soft and fragile and without a trace of doubt.  Bill placed the ring on her finger, and Laura held her breath…there was nothing to do, nothing to say, but these last few moments felt harder, somehow, than every night she had watched him sling his jacket over his shoulder and head home to someone else…harder, than the moment he’d handed her a wedding invitation…

_I do_ , Bill said, his deep voice steady and strong and unbreakable.  Laura closed her eyes, briefly, the impossible weight of the words heavy on her chest, in her throat.  When she opened them, her fingers digging into her palm, Bill and his wife were heading back up the aisle, smiling broadly, the gold in matching rings flashing on their joined hands, and the ceremony was over.

And now Laura had to figure out how to be done, now, too.


	8. vampire au

In Hollywood she wouldn’t have bothered; it was so easy there, to grab them off the streets, to whisper into their young hopeful ears promises about breakout parts and modeling gigs, a new, edgy band needed for a special, invite-only club.  (Were they getting younger and dumber, she wondered?  She certainly wasn’t getting any older.)

In the quiet towns she’d passed through on her way east, it would have been too risky; it had been out-of-towners only, grizzled truck drivers last seen heading off the interstate, a few girls who learned too late why they shouldn’t have been traveling alone.

But Laura was in New York now, where the lights never go out and enough money can bring anything right to your doorstep, and she was in the mood to celebrate.

“I just don’t know what’s wrong with it,” she cooed into the phone, curling her tongue around a lilt that suggested a homegrown accent she was trying hard to conceal.  

(The landlord’s number had been posted on the fridge, along with a handwritten note of welcome.  Bless Billy for his apartment and his organization; she was so glad she’d turned him just before the turn of the last century.  He was such a _good boy_ , something in short supply in those days and even rarer now; that education as a surgeon would have been wasted on him.)

“I guess the heat’s been off for a while now, and…” she turned pitifully towards the window, the steady fall of snow bright against the darkened sky, aware that he couldn’t see her but enjoying her own performance too much to stop, “…it’s just getting so _cold_ , and I don’t know what to _do_ …”

The landlord, as Laura had known he would, promised his best night repairman within the hour.

And Laura had been afraid she was losing her touch.

She fluffed her hair in the mirror (if Sir Richard had told her, lo these many centuries ago, when she was a tired, worn-out governess grown old from looking after other people’s children, that what he was about to do to her would give her hair a shine that never faded, her eyes a clarity they’d lacked in life, and a world in which every book she’d ever want could fit in a little piece of metal inside her pocket, she might not have screamed so loudly as she was bleeding to death), straightened the scarf around her neck, and waited.

When the knock came, she was ready.

“I’m here to fix your heater,” said the unsmiling rough-faced man in the dirty blue coveralls.

“Come on in,” Laura said, ushering him inside, with a wide smile that would have displayed her fangs, if he’d been paying attention.

She already knew the walls in Billy’s pre-war were too thick for anyone to hear his screams.

He was already kneeling in front of the radiator, his frown deepening the creases in his worn face; dreading breaking it to her that the heater wasn’t broken, just turned off, Laura guessed.

“What’s your name?” she purred, fangs already sharpening.

It was good manners, after all.  And it would help her recognize any whispers or headlines that meant she needed to get out town, fast.

“Bill Adama,” he sighed, still on his knees.  “Look, ma’am—”

But Laura was already moving, coming up behind him, fingers in his dark hair so he couldn’t escape, eagerly pushing aside his collar…

…where there were already two tiny puncture marks in his skin.

She let go immediately, backing up, keeping a chair between them.  “Forgive me…I didn’t…”

He got to his feet, grinning, baring fangs she should have foreseen.  “Welcome to New York, Laura.”


	9. they told me you were dead au

It’s a fourth-floor corner office, a far cry from the dingy Public Defender’s cubicle where they used to share brown-bagged lunches, but it’s her name on the door in gold lettering, and when he clenches his shaking hand and forces himself, stomach rising against his ribs, to knock on the thick polished wood, it’s her clipped, distracted voice that calls out “Come in.”

It feels a little cruel, showing up like this…to both of them, maybe.  He knows there was no letter from the Army, no official notification that he’d been found, that “Missing in action, presumed dead” had been whited out on his record after five long years.  (To tell the truth, Bill hadn’t quite listened as General Cain read from his updated file, too busy devouring his first cheeseburger since he’d shipped out to take in much beyond “POW” and “honorable discharge” and “You can go home.”)  He’d gone to her old apartment, where there was no forwarding address; he’d tried to get in touch with her parents, only to find a new family in the Roslin house and four obituaries when he searched for their names online.  All he’d been able to locate was a small announcement from a law office across the country almost two years ago, that Laura Roslin had been made a partner at Adar and Associates.  

It is the hardest thing he has ever done in his life, pushing open the door to her office and stepping inside. 

He doesn’t expect anything.  That’s what he told himself, on the interminable flight across the ocean, staring tensely out the window for hours, waiting for something to go wrong, for his captors to take him back; it’s what he told himself as he rented a car and drove across the country, counting the miles between them as they become double digits for the first time in almost a decade.  She thought he was dead.  He would have wanted her to move on.  She probably has a husband, children by now (he shuts a mental wall on that thought, on the memory of a day by the beach nearly ten years ago, Laura in a red bikini, her head on his chest, as they’d daydreamed names for the children they’d thought they’d have).  She may well be unhappy to see him.  She may tell him not to come again.

He keeps his eyes on the plush white carpet as he shuts the door behind him, his nose filling with a soft floral scent he’d spent five years’ worth of lonely nights trying to conjure up.  

“Yes?”

It’s no wonder she doesn’t recognize him from the back; he’s just a man in jeans and an Army sweatshirt, with graying hair that’s longer than she’d remember, and a scar down his chest she can’t see, and so many more lines on his face…

He turns, slowly, and meets her eyes.

Her hair is shorter now, falling below her shoulders in polished waves, but it’s the same bright red as in the handful of photographs he’d taken with him across the ocean.  There are black glasses perched on her nose that she didn’t used to need.  She’s wearing a blue suit, absent a single wrinkle.  Her hands rest on a pile of work on her desk, nails no longer chewed, but neatly filed and polished.

His ring is no longer on her finger.

She gasps, and he watches the blood drain from her face.  Her hand rises to hover uncertainly in front of her mouth.

He clears his throat, military discipline preventing him from shifting his feet or avoiding her eyes.  “I’m sorry to show up like this,” he says, beginning a speech he crafted and practiced as he drove across six states.  “I understand that this is a shock for you.  Five years ago I was taken captive, and presumed dead; two weeks ago, a team on an unrelated mission–”

He’d prepared himself for denial, for anger; he’d tried to ready himself to hear about a new man, a new life. 

What he is not prepared for is the way she rises, slowly, from behind her desk, the way she crosses the room, her eyes never leaving his, or the feel of her shaking fingers smoothing his chest.

“Bill,” she whispers, like she’s making sure.

He is not prepared for the tears that blur his vision at the sound of her voice shaping his name.

“These situations aren’t…easy,” he manages, fighting his way back to his script.  “There’s no need for guilt, or recriminations…”

Tears are falling from her green eyes.  He brings his hand to her cheek to cup her face.

“You thought I was dead,” he whispers.

She’s nodding, and he braces himself for the blow, the request that he leave, that he never come back.

“And if you ever leave my sight again, I’ll kill you myself,” she breathes, and then her legs are around his waist, and her lips are on his, and for the first time since the soldiers stormed the compound, he thinks he might really be going home, after all.


	10. sequel to previous

Laura and Bill finally peel themselves off each other, and Laura tells her assistant, Billy, that she’s taking the day off, or she quits, she doesn’t care which, and she takes Bill by the hand and leads him through the building and out the door, to a car he’s never seen before, and she tells him she’s going to take him home.  Her home.  Their home.  She has an apartment, but if he doesn’t like it, they’ll find another place– they don’t have to stay in California–is there anywhere he has to be?

Nowhere, he tells her.  Just with you.

(He likes her apartment fine, and it has a beautiful view of the downtown, and he loves watching the sun go down over the city…but it’s strange to walk into a space that holds none of their memories, no touchstones of their time together.  It hurt too much, she explains nervously, and he pretends that the absence of their pictures, his ring, doesn’t cut.  He had to do things to survive, had to put certain things away; he understands that Laura did, too.)

She takes his hand and leads him into her bedroom, and they don’t come out for days.  It takes her nearly three to tell him what happened to her family; longer for him to grind out even the smallest detail of his story, the bad food, the boredom.  She doesn’t talk about the man in the uniform who said he was never coming back; he doesn’t talk about how many years ago he’d given up on ever going home.  They don’t want to hurt each other.  But it comes out, in pieces: in Bill’s nightmares, his panic the first time he woke in the dark in her unfamiliar bed, the way his head ducks and his hands form fists at unexpected sounds…in Laura’s bitten-down fingernails, her red-rimmed eyes, the day he went out for a run and forgot to leave a note, and she came home from work to find him just…gone.

It’ll take time, Dr. Cottle keeps telling Bill, in their weekly sessions.  Time for them to get to know the people they are now, not the people they wish they’d been; time for Bill to work out what he wants to do with the rest of his days, time for both of them to stop flinching every time the phone rings.  

Days pass.  Bill learns to cook.  Christmas comes and they decorate a tiny blue spruce and listen to songs from their last holiday together.  They learn to laugh at their own tears.  Laura slips a ring out of a box in her nightstand and asks if he’d mind if she started wearing it again.  They go down to city hall the next day.  They frame their marriage license and start taking new pictures to put up on their walls.  It doesn’t ease Bill’s nightmares or stop Laura from having to pull off the freeway every few months, her chest suddenly tight and her eyes blurry…but it’s something.

They make trips to the beach.  They take pictures.  Bill goes back to school.  Laura takes on new cases.  They listen to Christmas songs again.  They celebrate their first anniversary, then their second.  

Calls from unfamiliar numbers still make Laura’s chest seize up; Bill still sees the muzzle of a gun in the flash of sunlight.  Maybe they should move to Seattle, he jokes to Laura.  But they also talk about adoption, about becoming foster parents.  They both know so much about loss, they figure.  Maybe they could use it.

A surly teenager named Lee moves into their spare bedroom.  It’s so much harder than they’d thought it would be, but when he silently sits on the very end of the couch to watch the game with Bill, or mentions to Laura that maybe he’d like to a lawyer someday, too, it’s the best thing they’ve ever done.  An angry kid named Kara joins them, and they put in an offer on their first house.  

Ten years pass, and they’ve been married longer than they were apart.  Bill still wakes up across the ocean some mornings, and has to breathe himself back into their bed, their house.  It’s still hard, sometimes.  He thinks it always will be.   _I’m home_ , Laura writes on his palm whenever she has to go away for work, the pen digging into his skin.  It’s half a joke, half an honest reminder in case he wakes up panicked in the night.  He thinks, some mornings, about having it tattooed there, a constant reassurance of safety…and instead he closes his eyes, and listens for the sound of the birds outside, and Kara and Lee’s bickering, and Laura’s steady presence…and for now, for today, it’s enough.


	11. road trip au

The sun, barely above the horizon, was just beginning to gather its strength, but the orange glow suffusing the nearly empty highway promised another blistering day ahead; the cracked leather of the wheel was already sticky beneath Laura’s cramped fingers, and even with the windows all the way down, the faint breeze couldn’t touch the heat that seemed to extend all the way to her bones, or the closed-attic mustiness that had clung to the car for the past fifty miles.

“Want me to take over?” Bill mumbled from the passenger seat, rubbing one-handed at eyes still half-closed.

She didn’t know if it was his paltry attempt at humor, or if the pain was bad enough that he’d forgotten where they were again.

She snorted, choosing to believe it was the former.  “I’m okay for now,” she said more gently.

She pressed her bare foot down harder on the gas, the grooved metal scraping delicate skin, and when the faded billboards and dusty roadside motels blurred past her window, and she could almost forget about the body in the trunk or the bullet in Bill’s shoulder, it was almost true.


	12. gods au

Wine swirls in her glass as the clouds billow beneath her, and she doesn’t even spare a glance for the two huddled together on the mountaintop so far below, gathering their courage to enter her temple and ask the seer their question.

Love, she guesses.  Should they run away together, will they be happy, will they have children…

If the odds are so stacked against them, if they’ve come all this way to plead for good news, she already knows they won’t get it.

“You don’t know that,” chides a deep voice from across her chamber, guessing her thoughts, as always.  “You might have misjudged them.”

He always wants her to look, always wants her to care.  He doesn’t know how much pain and suffering can come from knowing the future, how much even the goddess of fate can wish for what she didn’t know.

She shrugs, not rising from the bank of her little lake, her fingers toying with the stem of her glass.  “It won’t change what’s meant to be.”

“Maybe their love will be strong enough to overcome it.”

She snorts, gently.  He can’t help it; the god of love has to believe in hope and miracles and the magic of true love’s kiss and all those stories the mortals tell each other to sleep at night.  

She knows the endings, and she knows better.

“Then you deal with them,” she offers, waving a lazy hand towards the surface.  

His sigh is barely audible.  “If I can grant them a happy ending, will you admit that you can be wrong?”

But she’s never wrong, and she knows it.  She isn’t wrong about the plagues and fires and deaths of thousands that would follow if the goddess of fate and the god of love gave into what they both feel.  She isn’t wrong about the futility of everything he wants her to believe, when she could already tell him that the girl below them will be dead within a year, and the boy clutching her hand could never have made her happy, anyway.

Her smile is sad.  “I wish I could.”


	13. high school reunion au

It’s only the memory of the debate club president’s wry green eyes and bouncing red waves that has Bill standing with a plastic cup of sour punch under a hand-painted  _WELCOME CLASS OF ‘86_ banner, rubbing the pale indentation on a finger that until last night held a ring.

He keeps an eye on the door, watching old classmates trail in: Gaius Baltar, then student council president, now the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, an icily beautiful blonde on his arm; Ellen Tigh, former head cheerleader, now (if the rumors are to be believed) fresh out of rehab, augmenting her punch with a healthy dash of something clear from her purse; Tommy Zarek, one-time student council treasurer, now under indictment for insider trading.

When he hears her old friend Tory whisper that Laura wanted to be here, but she had a chemo treatment scheduled, he peels off his “Hi, I’m Bill Adama!” name tag, tossing it in the trash on his way out the door.


	14. fake dating au

Laura took off her glasses, setting them down on her desk with an irritated clack.  "If that was a proposal, Bill, then it’s the worst one I’ve ever heard in my life.“

Bill’s journalistic instincts begged him to ask just how many proposals she was talking about.  He suppressed the urge.  

“Purely business,” he assured her.  "You get two weeks’ vacation on a tropical island, all expenses paid, and all you have to do is accompany me to my son’s wedding.  One afternoon out of your life, and the rest of your time’s entirely yours.“

Laura leaned back in her chair, her eyes narrowing in a way that reminded him why she was one of the most feared editors in the business. “And why, exactly, does your family think we’re dating?”

“They don’t think _we’re_ dating,” Bill explained.  "They just think I’m dating _someone_ , and I thought a woman of your relentless pragmatism would appreciate a good offer when she heard one.“

Laura smiled, and Bill was suddenly reminded of the time he found his mother’s cat playing with a mouse caught in a trap.  "And why do they think you’re dating someone, Bill?”

“I…might have suggested it at Zak’s engagement dinner,” Bill admitted reluctantly.  "Carolanne–my ex–made a crack about how I was still wearing my wedding ring, and–“

“And you decided that, rather than taking off the ring for a marriage that was over five years ago and actually moving on with your life, it would be best to invent a fictitious girlfriend, whom you would then need to convince your boss to stand in for?”

Ordinarily, Bill would have reminded Laura that although she made more money than he did and had to approve all his stories, he didn’t _technically_ work for her, or that condescension wasn’t a particularly good look on her.  Instead, he tried for a smile.  “Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six.”

She rolled her eyes.  “If that means ‘come up with a completely ridiculous plan obviously doomed for failure,’ then you’ve achieved it.”

Bill edged towards the door, hiding his disappointment.  No matter what he’d told Laura, there really wasn’t anyone else in his life he thought was capable of pulling this off–even if they’d been so inclined, and no one was.

“Stay here, chained to your desk, then.  I’m sure I won’t have any trouble finding someone else to take your place–”

Laura got up from her desk, her smile broadening like a wolf laying eyes on a limping deer.  “Oh, I’ve already decided to go with you,” she said, her tone casual, like she was giving her takeout order to the office errand boy.  “At the very least, I might get my next book out of it.”

* * *

“See, look what a nice hotel this is,” Bill enthused, spreading his arms to take in the opulent lobby, the Olympic-sized pool circled by deck chairs, the white sandy beaches and sparkling blue waves barely a minute’s walk away.

Laura looked at him over the top of her sunglasses.  “If your’re trying to convince me to invest, Bill, this is the last favor I plan to do for you, and by ‘last,’ I mean ‘of this lifetime, or possibly longer, if we reincarnate.’”

Bill swallowed a retort about a single lifetime being more than enough of her company, too.  “It was a long flight,” he said instead.  “I’ll just be happy to get to my room and sack out for a few hours–”

“Dad!”

Bill swore mentally in three languages before he turned to face his older son.  “Lee,” he said, shaking his hand with as much warmth as he could muster under the circumstances.  “I didn’t expect you for another two weeks–”

His son shrugged.  “I figured, if Zak and Kara were going to drag me out here for their ridiculous ‘destination wedding,’ why shouldn’t I get a vacation out of it?”  He held out his hand to Laura, standing mutely at Bill’s side.  “You must be Dad’s girlfriend.  I’m sorry, I don’t think he mentioned your name–”

“Laura Roslin,” she introduced herself after a moment’s pause.  “You must be Lee.  It’s so good to meet you.”

“We were just checking in,” Bill butted in, casting a worried look at Laura.  “It was a long flight–”

“No rush,” Lee said, hitting the buzzer on the front desk.  “We’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.  It’s a pretty small island.”  His son’s bright smile made Bill want to kill him.  “We couldn’t avoid each other if we tried.”

A suited employee with ‘Felix Gaeta’ on his name tag appeared behind the heavy desk.  “I apologize for the wait, Mr. Adama, but your rooms are ready now, if you’d like to step this way–”

Lee raised his eyebrows.  “Rooms?”

“There must be some mistake,” Bill floundered, looking between his fake girlfriend and his actual son like a drowning man praying for a life raft.  “I asked for–”

“Of course we only want one room,” Laura said, smile showing too much teeth, as she dug carefully manicured fingernails into Bill’s arm.  “Don’t we, darling?”


	15. reincarnation au i

Maybe it’s what she’s been smoking to help with the chemo treatments (it doesn’t, not really, but she’s not about to stop), maybe it’s denial (”The tumors aren’t shrinking,” she’d heard at her last appointment, along with “I’m sorry”), maybe it’s the sad fantasy of a dying woman–but when Lee Adama’s father storms into the late-afternoon emptiness of her fourth-grade classroom, to lean against a child-sized desk, arms crossed, and demand answers on his son’s recent struggles in math, Laura can’t speak.

He wasn’t so hard, so brittle the last time they were together (the smoke rising from the wing of the plane, their hands clasped together as the sky rushed past the windows) or the time before that (his strong fingers pressing hers one last time before going slack, as the lines on the monitors spiked and then went flat).

But then, Laura knows about loneliness, the kind that stains your bones and sharpens the lines around your mouth.  She knows what their lifetimes apart have done to her.  She can see it in the frost in his blue eyes and the stiffness in his shoulders, where her head won’t rest in this life, either.

She gets to her feet, her head swimming as she stands too quickly, and briskly informs him that this is her last day, but she’ll be sure to make a note for her substitute to get back to him.  She doesn’t meet his eyes, keeping her hands busy piling papers on her desk and hunting for her keys.  When she turns off the lights in her classroom and heads for the door, he’s still standing there, in the dark, staring after her.  (Wondering if it’s worth it to get the principal involved, or if the substitute might be easier to work with, she guesses.)

She doesn’t look back.


	16. reincarnation au ii

It’s always different: the reverent hush of a throne room and the dull roar of fists on prison bars, sword-wielding rebellion and quiet nights grading papers, too many hospitals to count, her graveside and his.

It’s always the same: blue eyes catching hers, the fleeting touch of a calloused hand, a deep voice that carries the weight of painful choices and hard-won trust.

They always find each other.

* * *

“Do you remember them all?” 

Smoke drifts lazily above them.  He should crack a window, let in some clean air.  He lets his head fall back on the pillow and curls around her instead.

“I remember you telling me what to do a lot.”

Her laughter is so familiar it hurts.  He wonders how long they’ll have this time, if the cancer has already taken root.  Some lifetimes are kinder than others.  

She shifts to face him, the wicked sparkle in her eye catching him off guard.  It always does.

“That’s because last time, you were a German Shepherd.”

She’s making fun of him…he hopes.  Truthfully, he doesn’t remember.  Her memories are always stronger than his.  But he can imagine worse fates.

He shrugs.  “Sounds more relaxing than that time I was your butler.”

She props herself up on his chest.  “You only say that because you don’t remember the outfit I made you wear.  And _the hat_.”

He squints up at the ceiling deliberately, pretending to call the memory into being.  The light slants through delicate curtains, and for a moment, the smoke twists, rises like a mushroom cloud above a planet that isn’t this one.  He shivers.

Her voice softens.  “You okay?”

Without answering, he slides his arm beneath her to flip her over on her back, cutting off her giggles with the press of his mouth on hers.

What he remembers is this: there will never be enough time.


	17. spy au

“So, Commander,” Laura said, taking a delicate sip of her wine, her eyes never leaving his wary blue ones, where confusion warred with a reluctant interest, “is the Galactica really all they say?”

William Adama ( _56 years old,_ she remembered from her briefing, _divorced, tendency to drink more than he should_ ) had been easy to spot: dress grays in a ballroom full of civilian black tie, yes, but it was his upright bearing, his clear discomfort, the tiny but deliberate gap between himself and the rest of the politicos and trendsetters and hangers-on that had called to her like a siren song.

After nearly two decades in this business, she could have sidled up to him at the bar and struck up an effortless conversation in her sleep.  

She let her ruby-painted lips widen, baring a brilliant smile that felt like sharpened fangs.  “I’ve never been aboard one myself, but from what I hear–” she let her fingertips trace his uniformed arm, prompting the tiniest of shivers–“those old ships are still worth the ride.”

* * *

Usually, her work took her to penthouse suites, king-sized pillow-topped beds made up with silk sheets.  Adama’s narrow rack was nearly a homecoming, so like her own spartan quarters back at the base.  She hadn’t been called back in nearly a year, now; maybe, when this assignment was completed, they’d let her rest…

She pushed the thought from her mind as she slid soundlessly from the bed, Adama’s snorted inhales and shuddering exhales a soothing counterpoint to her work.  She hadn’t bothered to drug him; the old man would be out till morning, she knew.  

She shrugged into a faded brown robe left hanging from a char and retrieved her clutch from where she’d let it fall, safely tucked out of the way beneath the bed.  Briskly pulling on a pair of leather gloves, she got to work.  

Even in the dim light of the single bedside lamp, the blueprints weren’t difficult to find, at least to Laura’s trained eye.  She took quick recordings with the tiny camera concealed in her silver bracelet.  No need to steal them; it would only raise suspicions.  No need for anyone to know she ever saw these…least of all Adama.  

He’d already be waking up alone.  

She collected her dress and heels from the floor, preparing to slip from his quarters just as silently.  

Another mission accomplished.  

* * *

Bill Adama woke at 0600, as was his custom.  He stretched out beneath the worn blankets, wincing at the soreness in protesting muscles.

A soft floral scent still lingered in the robe he wrapped around himself, but she was long gone, as he’d known she would be.

He wasn’t surprised that she’d left no note behind.  

He sat down at his desk, everything just as he’d left it.  He pressed a button on the intercom, ordering his usual breakfast: a pot of strong coffee, toast and eggs for one.  

After he’d had his coffee, he’d call Saul, ask him to take the early-morning shift.  He was in no rush to face his crew this morning, not with the news of the flight of the commander’s one night stand making the rounds.  Besides, there was no hurry.  

It would be at least an hour, he figured, before she found the tiny tracker he’d slipped into her hair.

Another mission accomplished.


	18. soulmates whose last words to each other are in their skin au

When the black ink swam up to the surface of his palm on the morning of his twenty-first birthday, forming letters printed indelibly just beneath the skin, Bill stared at the words for a solid hour. 

_I’m having trouble breathing._

* * *

 

As the years went by, Bill watched his friends’ assiduous pursuit of their soulmates with a wistful detachment. It was different for most of them, he knew. They had _I love you_ and _See you at home_ and sometimes _It was nice meeting you_ ; they had guesses, but no certainties. 

Bill knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that had no interest in a story with his particular ending. 

* * *

 

Carolanne’s ink had never come in. It happened sometimes; maybe her soulmate had died in childhood, maybe they would simply never meet. On their wedding day, Bill tried not to think about another woman, one he hoped never to meet, and whether the ink marking her skin would finally run dry. 

* * *

 

Twenty years, two children, and one very unpleasant divorce later, Bill looked back on his youthful fears with chagrin. He’d married a woman he knew he wasn’t right for–why? To spare himself pain? Pain, Bill had discovered, had a way of finding you no matter what. He was ready to live his life now–starting with allowing Saul and Ellen to drag him out to a bar on his birthday. 

* * *

 

She was beautiful, the woman perched on the barstool next to him. Smart, funny; Bill hadn’t felt a connection like this…well, ever. In the past, he would have been running now. But he was a changed man. He was ready to be brave.

When she made excuses about leaving, saying the smoke from the other patrons was bothering her allergies, coughing something into her hand he couldn’t quite catch, Bill followed her out of the bar.

“Call me,” he called across the street. “My name is Bill Adama–” 

She froze, and turned–and the car making the turn into the blind alley behind the bar hit her dead on. 

He ran for her, calling for help. But he’d seen the crash; he knew it was too late.

He fumbled for her wrist, feeling no pulse beneath her skin. But there was something… 

Slowly, he uncurled her palm. 

_My name is Bill Adama._


	19. i think my wife has been sleeping with your husband au

Laura’s fingers turned white on the receiver.  "Excuse me?“

“I think my wife is sleeping with your husband,” a deep, weary voice rumbled.  "Please don’t make me repeat it a third time.“

* * *

 

In the beginning, the signs had been easy enough to overlook.  The late nights at the office, the frequent business trips…the new password on Richard’s phone, the strange credit card charges he claimed were business expenses

But it was the constant knot in the pit of her stomach, the gnawing ache when Richard avoided her eyes or her touch, that told her that Mr. Adama was right. 

* * *

 

Ordinarily, Laura didn’t leave work in the middle of the day, nor did she order straight Scotch before noon.  But meeting her husband’s lover’s husband seemed to be the kind of special circumstances for which hard liquor was invented.  

“How did you find out?” Laura ventured at last.  

Bill glowered into his glass.  

Was that considered a rude question, under the circumstances, she mused?

“Carolanne left her computer open,” Bill grumbled at last.  "The email was addressed to your husband.“

Idly, Laura wondered what the exposure of an email like that would do to Richard’s nascent political career.  She also had some lingering doubts about the exact truthfulness of Bill’s her-email-just-happened-to-be-open story.  

“Are they planning to leave us?” she asked instead. 

Bill drained his glass.  "I’m not gonna wait around to find out.“

* * *

 

Three drinks in, Laura was feeling somewhat more philosophical herself.  

“Maybe we could have them killed,” she suggested.  "Assassinations,“ she paused, proud of her clear pronunciation of the word, "have to be cheaper than divorces, right?”

“I’ve never done either,” Bill mumbled.  "Death might be too quick and painless, though.“

Laura swirled her glass thoughtfully; liquid sloshed over the side.  "Richard and I have a prenup,” she reflected.  "I won’t get anything.  Destroying his campaign, though…I would enjoy that.“

For the first time all day, Bill smiled.  It wasn’t a nice smile, but Laura felt it still counted as progress.  "Carolanne’s social position is everything to her,” he said.  "If she were to be… _embarrassed_ …“

Laura clinked her glass unsteadily to Bill’s.  "Partners,” she decided.  

* * *

 

_Mayoral Candidate’s Wife Embroiled In Affair_ read the headline in the morning paper, above a black and white–but quite clear–snapshot of Laura on Bill’s lap, his hands on her bare back, her lips against his neck.  

It was too bad Richard had never come home last night, Laura reflected.  She would have liked to see his face when he saw his career go up in flames.  

She dialed a number she now knew by heart.  "Has she seen it?“ she whispered.    
She could hear the smile in Bill’s voice.  "Only after all her friends had,” he whispered back.  "She’s not taking it well.  Apparently being cheated on is _quite_ upsetting.“

Laura giggled.  "Then she’s going to _hate_ what we have planned for this afternoon,” she cooed.  "Meet you in an hour?“

Distantly, she heard the sound of china smashing as Bill hung up.  She hummed to herself as she put on her coat.  

Revenge, Laura decided, touching up her lipstick, was much more fun than marriage ever was.   


	20. dog trainer au

Laura Roslin has been a dog trainer for…well, more years than she likes to count, and what makes her the best is this: she can always figure out what’s going wrong in the dog’s training before the appointment even begins.(“It’s a gift,” she’d told her former boss smugly as she left to start her own private practice, because if Richard wasn’t going to leave his wife for her she wasn’t going to leave her best tip behind for him.)

Take now, for example: the man uncomfortably hunched in a chair in her waiting room, arms crossed, eyes straight ahead, talking quietly to his dog…he’s embarrassed to be there, and will therefore feel compelled to resist the very advice he’s paying for.  Laura can tell that right now. 

And the black lab straining the end of the leash, curiously sniffing under chairs and into corners, cheerfully ignoring her owner’s muttered, half-pleading commands to “ _Sit_ , G, come _on_ …”

Well, it has inconsistency in rewards and punishments all over it, with a side of overindulgence. 

But Laura’s not concerned.  Anything improper training can do, Laura Roslin can fix!…or so promises her brand-new website, crafted by her brand-new assistant, Tory, who seemed to take Laura’s lack of internet presence as a personal affront to all she holds dear.

(Laura misses her old assistant, Billy, gone off to graduate from vet school, every day.)

She might as well get what promises to be an irritating fifty minutes over with.  She steps out of her office. 

“I’m Laura Roslin,” she says, holding out her hand for her new client as he rises from the chair. 

“Bill Adama,” he answers, with a firm grip.  He looks her straight in the eyes, always a good sign with a new client.  Coupled with his rigid posture and cropped hair, Laura guesses a military background.  “Thank you for working us into your schedule so quickly.”

That must be Tory’s work: she keeps telling everyone who calls for an appointment that Laura’s booked out months in advance.  This is not, nor has it ever been, true, but Laura can’t deny the distinct uptick in business since Tory started manning the front desk.

“No trouble at all,” Laura can say honestly.  “Please, come this way.”

She leads Bill and his dog to the training area, a cozy space littered with tennis balls, bright red Kongs, and a pleasing variety of stuffed animals.  “Can I be introduced to you, too?” she coos at the dog, but in a blur of dark fur, the dog is already off to gleefully chase after a purple squeaky ball. 

“Her name’s Galactica,” Bill rumbles, crossing his arms in a gesture that Laura’s professional opinion on body language, canine and human, would classify as “defensive.”

Galactica is clearly a ridiculous name for a dog, but Laura’s morning obedience class included a Jelly Bean and a Winston Churchill, so she does not comment.

“Galactica, come,” she calls, using her most authoritative tone.  “ _Come_.”

Her furry ears perk up, but to Laura’s complete lack of surprise, she does not turn around, pouncing happily on the ball, making it squeal over and over again.

“She gets a little excited,” Bill puts in. 

Fully eight percent of Laura’s clients are dogs that “get a little excited.” 

“Galactica, _come_ ,” she calls again, in a voice that neither man nor dog has ever been able to refuse.

Bill coughs.  “She doesn’t quite—”

He stops, mid-sentence, as Galactica obediently turns and comes to sit at Laura’s feet. 

“What a smart girl,” Laura coos. 

Bill, unexpectedly, appears crestfallen.  “I didn’t even know she could do that.”

Laura nods; she can add “low expectations” to the list of what’s going wrong here. 

“Why don’t you tell me what’s brought you here today,” Laura suggests diplomatically, absently tossing a tennis ball for Galactica. 

Bill sighs, looking down at his dog, who cheerfully returns the ball to Laura.  “She’s a very sweet dog.  I work at the army base, and I adopted her when she flunked out of the advanced training class there.  And she's very smart.  Smarter than some people I work with.  But I just can’t get her to do anything she doesn’t want to do.”

Laura nods, thoughtfully, as though she doesn’t hear this five times a day, and as though it is not always, always, the owner’s fault.  “Sometimes,” she begins, “with that particular problem, I find…”

“And then there’s the TV problem,” Bill adds.

Laura raises an eyebrow; she is not a cable repair person, and she is not here for a litany of Bill’s trouble’s in life.  “The TV problem?”

“She keeps turning it on in the middle of the night, and if I ignore her, she just turns the volume up.  I tried to ignore her two nights ago—because attention just reinforces the behavior, I know that—and she turned _Who’s the Boss_ up so loud my neighbors called the cops.”

Laura snorts, and then tries to disguise it as a cough.  “That must be very difficult.  Have you tried putting the remote where she can’t reach?”

Bill levels a look at her over the top of his glasses that would put any drill sergeant to shame.  “Last night I slept with it under my pillow, and she still got it.”

Perhaps…perhaps she was a little hard on him.

“Either way,” she begins, “I think that our basic approach is the same.  We want to reward Galactica for responding to commands, and gently but firmly discourage her from repeating unwanted behavior.”

“I was hoping for something a little less basic, and a little more promising,” Bill suggests. 

Laura has been prepared for this moment since she watched him out in her waiting room.  “Of course, if you don’t want to take my advice, you are more than welcome to take your dog elsewhere.  I can recommend a few highly qualified trainers…”

“That won’t be necessary,” Bill rumbles, defeated.  She guesses he has already been to see those highly qualified trainers, to no avail.  “How long do you think it will take until I see results?  I haven’t slept through the night since I brought her home.”

Laura feels for him, and she admires that he’s sticking with it, not dropping the dog at the nearest shelter and running for the door, which is why it pains her to say: “With weekly sessions, I think you ought to see an improvement in about twelve weeks.”

Galactica sighs and drops her head to her paws.

Laura looks between the dog and her owner.  “I know how you feel.”

Bill does not appear amused.


	21. what did i do with that magic wand au

This kind of dilemma, Bill assumed, was exactly the kind of trouble his father had had in mind, twenty years earlier, when King Joseph had objected so strongly to the union of his son, then-Crown Prince William of Galactica, to the village sorceress.

“Where did you last see it?” Bill prompted patiently, as he followed his wife through the castle, wondering if he should warn the populace that spinning wheels might be about to become deadly objects (as they had last time Queen Laura had had a spot of bother with her wand) or if this might be one of those rare, glorious problems that were solved inside the castle, without any of the peasants the wiser.

Laura fluffed at her thick red waves absently as she knelt to feel around under the throne.  “I was doing a fertility spell--I know, I promised,” she added, anticipating his objection, “but the villagers just aren’t having enough babies.  It’s simple math.”

It had occurred to Bill, once or twice over the intervening sixteen years, to ask his wife if there had been any magical intervention involved in the conception of their son, Prince Lee...but somehow, it always seemed safer not to inquire.

Laura’s magic came in handy, of course, during famines, when she enchanted their granaries never to empty, and when plague swept through the kingdom, her spells had saved them all...

“...but I know I had it when I came back to the castle,” Laura mused, “because I did that blessing on our algae stores...”

...but sometimes, spells backfired, as they had last year, when the year’s harvest turned to dust...

Bill coughed.  “I thought we agreed, after last time--”

Laura flashed him a smile.  “I forgive you, Bill, for your lack of foresight.”

Maybe Laura’s missing wand was really its own kind of blessing.  Maybe it would do Galactica some good to have a little...break from magic, to allow its more conservative residents (their king included) to adjust to his wife’s many ( _many_ ) plans for a new and improved kingdom.

“You know, Laura, you’ve been so busy lately,” he began.  “It might be nice to...to take a little time off, to spend some more time with Lee--”

“Lee!” she exclaimed.  “I remember, I lent it to Lee.  He’s a sweet boy, but he needs to learn to be smarter about magic, and not so _good_ about it...”

Bill did not know what this meant, but he feared that he would soon find out, the answer shouted by a mob of angry villagers equipped with axes and torches.

Maybe, he pondered, trailing behind her, he really was being shortsighted.  Maybe their son had learned some kind of valuable lesson today, the kind of magical education Bill himself felt the lack of every day.  Maybe their son would be the finest king Galactica had ever seen.

And maybe...maybe he’d ask Laura to enchant the castle gates so they wouldn’t be quite so flammable.

Just to be on the safe side.


	22. dementia au

“Laura,” she introduces herself, over and over again, every time she visits.  

She leaves out her last name (too confusing), her job (too hard to explain), the precise location of their visits.  It’s easier if they don’t dwell on details, on memories, if they keep their conversation strictly to the here and now: the unseasonably chilly weather, the mashed potatoes on the menu for lunch, the game show playing cheerfully on the small TV.

There’s something else she doesn’t say, something that quietly lurks in her mind as she smiles brightly, as she straightens the faded hospital gown, as she explains patiently that yes, she comes every Sunday, so she was here last Sunday, and the Sunday before that…

Would watching her mother die of cancer be easier?

* * *

Judith Roslin had been a resident of this facility for six months.  In the beginning, she’d fought the decision daily, vociferously; Laura had had to duck out of Cabinet meetings to field constant phone calls as her mother argued, surprisingly articulately, that she didn’t need nursing care or monitoring, that she was perfectly capable of looking after herself.

And Laura would have to explain the things Judith didn’t remember: the panicked calls from her car, when she was driving and suddenly didn’t recognize her surroundings; the fifteen pounds she’d lost, forgetting to feed herself; the fire that had burned out Laura’s childhood kitchen, as her mother tried to light the burner on an electric stove.

The facility came highly recommended.  Judith’s room is a private one, with a bay window that overlooks the garden; the meals served in the dining hall are crafted by an award-winning chef.  

It still isn’t enough to ease the clench in Laura’s throat when she thinks of her mother being cared for by strangers, or the burning tears that blur her vision every time she drives away.

* * *

The Education budget’s been slashed yet again, and tomorrow morning she testifies before a Congressional committee, so when Laura rounds the corner and finds Judith’s bed empty, running on three hours of sleep in as many days, she can’t suppress the gasp of terror that escapes her lips or the sudden sag of her body against the door frame.

“Ma’am?”

The deep voice belongs to a stocky man with graying hair standing in the doorway of the room across the hall.  “Are you looking for Judith Roslin?  She’s in here.”

Laura brushes past him impatiently…and then stops short.  Her mother’s sitting on the edge of a bed, laughing with a man Laura doesn’t recognize.  Her cheeks are flushed; she looks younger than she has in years.

Judith doesn’t notice her at all.

“I’m Bill Adama,” the man explains, quietly, so as not to disturb the two in the room.  “That’s my father, Joseph.”

She watches Joseph squeeze her mother’s hand.  Judith doesn’t pull away.

“She made a friend,” Laura whispers, blinking to clear her vision.  “That makes me so happy…and so sad.”  

She glances at Bill, suddenly self-conscious.  “Is that terrible?”

“I know how you feel,” he admits, a rueful flush to his pitted cheeks.  “My mother’s still alive.”

* * *

She lets Bill buy her a cup of tea down in the overpriced cafeteria.  That moment when she found her mother’s bed empty feels like it’s aged her years, and she takes a slow sip of chamomile, hoping Bill won’t mention the trembling in her hands.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” he says instead.

She straightens in her seat, her hands tightening around her cup.  “My job is very demanding, and it doesn’t give me a lot of free time.  I have exactly one day off a week, and I spend it here.  When I leave here today, I have to head back to the office.  My fridge is empty, I still have Christmas lights up, and I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in months.  What do you _want_ from me?”

Bill’s eyebrows lift.  “I usually come on Saturdays, is all I meant.”

Only two decades in politics prevents Laura’s embarrassment from showing on her face.

“Forgive me,” she says lightly, taking a sip of tea.  "Guilty conscience.“

His lips quirk, but there’s concern in his eyes.  "Is it just you?  Taking care of her, I mean?”

Laura doesn’t talk about this, not ever.  But after her outburst, refusing to answer seems too rude.  

“There was an accident, years ago,” she explains, as briefly as possible.  "My father and my sisters were killed.  Ever since then, it’s just been my mother and I.“

A lump rises in her throat, and she can’t say any more.  

“She seems happy here,” Bill offers.  

Laura shrugs.  "When I first brought her here, she couldn’t stop talking about going home, about missing the house where she got married and raised my sisters.  Now she doesn’t remember any of that at all, or _me_ , and I…I’m not sure why I’m telling you any of this,“ she admits, rubbing her forehead.  

Bill stirs his coffee thoughtfully.  "My father and I never had an easy relationship.  He didn’t approve of where I went to school, what I studied…he didn’t like my ex-wife, but he didn’t approve of my divorce…now, whenever I come to see him, he’s happy to see me.  He asks about my day, my job, my kids…it’s the best time together we’ve ever had.”

Laura snorts, then covers her mouth with her hand.  "I’m sorry.“

A reluctant grin pulls at his lips.  "Some days, I’m not sure I am.”  He shrugs.  "But then, I haven’t had to explain my father’s new girlfriend to my mother yet.“

Laura hides her smile. “To our old parents and our new,” she says, clinking her cup gently to Bill’s.  

* * *

Next Sunday, Judith’s bed is, once again, empty.  Laura finds her mother in the lounge, seated beside Joseph Adama, happily sharing a pot of tea.

“Thank God you’re here,” Bill comments from behind her, leaning against the mantle unobtrusively.  "I was beginning to feel like a third wheel.“

Laura has to blink back tears.  Her mother’s happy.  She isn’t sad or lonely or homesick.  That’s what’s important…even if Laura has never felt more alone in her life.  

“It’s true, it’s a little depressing,” she says instead.  "My mother doesn’t know the year or her address, but this is twice she’s had a date when I haven’t.“

“You know, there’s a Thai place a few miles away,” Bill suggests.  "If you want to make it only once…“

Judith laughs out loud, and for a moment, Laura’s heart feels lighter, too.  

Maybe she could skip just one Sunday.  

She turns back to Bill, watching her carefully.  

“Please tell me my mother didn’t fall for a line that bad.”

Bill’s mouth quirks.  "I believe my father asked her to sit next to him at Bingo.  I can’t top that.“

Laura smiles.  "How romantic.”

And when Bill offers her his arm, for the first time, she walks out of the nursing home without tears in her eyes.


	23. oregon trail au

He doesn’t notice her until the day after the rock slide, when he finds her standing off by herself, lovingly arranging a stack of well-worn books on a sunny patch of tall grass, gently wiping the ever-present dust off their covers, and then resolutely walking away, her chin high.

He pretends he doesn’t notice the clench of her fists in her skirts or the glistening trail down her cheek.

* * *

After he lost his family (Zak to the influenza epidemic, Carolanne to laudanum, Lee to bitterness), Bill couldn’t stay in Caprica City.  Oregon wasn’t a dream for him, the way it was for Galen and Sharon Tyrol, or an adventure, the way it was for Helo and Gaeta and even the young widow Mrs. Starbuck.  

If he didn’t make it, he didn’t care.

* * *

The rock slide that destroys two wagons seems, at the time, just one more obstacle, one more distressing event in an already troubled journey.  But when the deceptively minor cut to Richard Adar’s leg becomes infected, and a swift fever claims him four days later, everything changes.

Adar had been their leader, the undisputed authority behind every decision.  Now, the camp is in an uproar: should they keep going?  Turn back?

Bill can’t go back.

When the silent, sad woman who left her books behind starts quietly giving orders to get them moving forwards, he backs her without thinking.

* * *

Miss Laura Roslin doesn’t talk about where she’s from, or why she left, or what she hopes is ahead of her out west.  But her steady leadership keeps them moving, keeps them fed, keeps them safe, and that’s all Bill needs to know.  No one ever says it aloud, and certainly no one thanks her, but it’s obvious, at least to Bill, that she’s a better leader than Adar ever was.  

(There are rumors about an unmarried woman traveling alone, about a slight figure sneaking out of Adar’s wagon, a flash of red hair seen too late at night for any kind of proper visit.  Bill ignores those rumors.)

Bill buried his heart back east in Caprica City.  But sometimes, when he and Miss Roslin stay up late into the night, studying maps by firelight…when her eyes light up with a hidden water source found by Mrs. Starbuck, a buffalo felled by Helo, a broken wheel mended by Gaeta…when after a difficult passage through the mountains, her fingers tighten around his…

Maybe there’s something left for him, after all.

* * *

Oregon is beautiful: lush greens and fragrant rains and so much open space, it’s like finding a new world.

Bill hates everything about it.

Their little group disbands: Helo off to the mines, the Tyrols off to buy land, Mrs. Starbuck off exploring.

Only Laura is left.

“Have you thought about what you’ll do now?” she asks, gathering what’s left of her things in one small box.

He shrugs.  “I guess I never thought we’d make it.”

Her tone is dry.  “Thanks.”

He smiles, but it hurts.  “What about you?”

Her eyes are distant, on the horizon.  “I’m thinking of building a cabin. Somewhere quiet…with a little lake, maybe… ”

“Big job for one person,” he suggests.

“I think I’ll manage.”

He knows she will.

He doesn’t try to stop her when she picks up her things.

“Of course…” Her voice is slow, thoughtful, the way it was so many times on their travels, when a serious decision was on her mind.  “…if someone were to offer to help, I wouldn’t turn them down.”  

He lifts the box from her arms, and it’s like a weight has been lifted from his chest.

Maybe the west isn’t so bad, after all.


	24. abducted by aliens au

The last thing Bill remembers is staring up at the night sky (since his bereavement leave and the subsequent “suggested” retirement, it feels like his life has come down to nothing but that: daylight hours spent splashing whiskey into a sticky glass and wading through old photo albums till his fingers callous, and nights looking up at the stars, wishing he could go home) and then a bright, burning light, bearing down on him.   

* * *

                        Bill has spent his life in space.  When he wakes up, he knows he’s not on the ground anymore.  He also knows that the walls that ripple like liquid, the glow of the small room that comes from no source, the faint smell of something sweet but utterly foreign, do not belong to a Colonial ship.                            

* * *

“Are you a Cylon?”

The woman–or so she appears–smiles, and it chills him.  She can’t be human, but the wry twist of her lips, the warmth in her green eyes, the curl of her red hair against her narrow shoulders…it all feels so real.  

“No,” she says.  "Are you?“                        

* * *

In the beginning–he’s long since lost any sense of time–he’s kept in the small, eerie room.  Slowly, he’s introduced to other parts of the ship, each as strange as the last, and to other beings, all as human, and as somehow _wrong_ , as the next.  But it’s only his original visitor who seems to have any interest in him.  

“Do you have a name?” he asks, at one of what have become their regular talks.

She pauses.  "Not in the way you’d think of it,“ she says carefully.  Then that smile sneaks into her eyes.  "You could give me one, if you want.”

He tilts his head, watching the slight flush color her pale cheeks.  

“Laura,” he decides, remembering a first-grade teacher of Lee’s, years and years ago now.  "You look like a Laura.“                        

* * *

“Why me?”

She shrugs, and he still doesn’t know if the gesture is organic to her, or if it’s something she’s learned from watching him, a performance.  

“We’re trying to find a home,” she says at last, and he knows she doesn’t mean herself and him.  

“When I heard you that night, wanting the same thing so badly…I wanted to give it to you.”


	25. completely implausible court order is keeping me in this one-horse town against my will au

“I hate this town,” Laura muttered, teeth gritted, as she collapsed onto a stool at the counter of Adama’s and stabbed at the plastic-edged menu with one sharp crimson-painted fingernail.  

“Morning, Laura,” Bill said cheerfully. “How’s the day treating you?”

Laura narrowed her eyes above her glasses.  "Am I still here in Galactica?“ she asked rhetorically, a dangerous edge to her voice.  

Bill squinted at her.  "Looks like it.”

“Have you learned how to make a decent cup of coffee?”

His grin widened.  "Nope.“

She threw down the menu with enough force to send it skidding off the counter.  "Then _not so good_.”

He bent down to pick up the errant item, knowing full well that even behind the counter, she could hear him laughing.  

* * *

“How’d you wind up in Galactica, again?” Bill prompted, setting down a steaming cup of coffee–“Black, no milk, no sugar, and why does it always taste _burned_?”–beside the woman who in the last six months had become his favorite customer.

He knew the story, of course; everyone who’d met Laura, even in passing, knew the story.  But he still enjoyed hearing it…and Laura, simmering with a banked but still-bright rage, loved telling it.  

And she always told it the same way.  

“My father,” she began, “founded a tech startup–”

“Here in Galactica,” Saul Tigh, another regular, put in from three stools down.

Laura’s wintry glare could have frozen oceans.  Saul, busy plowing through the Saul Tigh Special–two eggs (scrambled, smothered in cheese and hot sauce), fried potatoes (ketchup on the side), and two slices of bacon (extra crispy)–didn’t notice.

Bill covered his chuckle with a cough.

“He sent me to all the best boarding schools, grooming me to take over Roslin Industries someday,” Laura continued after a pause, as Bill had known she would.  “But after he died, when his lawyer read the will–”

“–your father had stipulated ownership of the company on residence in Galactica,” the Chief called from the kitchen.

“–where you’d never set foot in your life,” the rest of Bill’s customers chorused.

Laura dropped her head in her hands.  “I hate this town,” she muttered.

* * *

Privately, Bill thought there was something noble about Edward Roslin’s decision.  Nearly half the families in Galactica included a member who worked for Roslin Industries in some form: at the factories, at the call center, not to mention all the businesses that wouldn’t survive without the Roslin employees to feed and house and entertain.  If Laura had decided to relocate her company, as so many others had, Galactica would almost certainly have gone under.  Galactica had supported Edward Roslin on his way to global fame and unimaginable fortune; it was good of him to believe he owed the town something in return.

But Bill would never have been so foolish as to tell any of that to Laura.

* * *

“Maybe you’d like Galactica more if you went anywhere besides your house, your office, the factory, and this diner,” Bill suggested, refilling her cup.

(No matter how much Laura complained about the coffee, she put away an average of four cups a day.)

“If you’d like to recommend another establishment, I’d be happy to take my business elsewhere,” Laura replied sweetly, without taking her eyes off her phone.

“I’d miss you,” Bill returned cheerfully.

* * *

“You know, there’s a reading at the bookstore tonight,” Bill said, as he handed Laura her receipt.

“I don’t have time,” Laura replied, gathering her things in her bag.  

Bill wasn’t surprised.

“Then I’ll see you for dinner tonight?”

“Unless somebody opens a sushi place in this godforsaken town before six,” Laura grumbled.

The bell on the door rang out as she slammed it behind her.

“Give it up, Bill,” Saul advised, through a mouthful of eggs.

Bill smiled as he wiped down her place at the counter, thinking about the flyer for the reading, quietly slipped into her bag when she’d thought he wasn’t looking.  “I don’t know what you mean.”


	26. i didn't realize you were the author when i insulted the book au

No matter how long the line was, how many eager readers Laura had to tune out as they chattered to each other about this dreadful book and its even more odious author, it would not begin to make up for the favors Billy had done her as her assistant.Billy had picked her up from chemo treatments; he had driven her home from surgery; he had held back what was left of her hair while she threw up his homemade soup.Anything she did to show her appreciation in return, no matter how large the gesture, would never make them even.

But considering how much Laura hated the macho detective genre, she figured getting Billy’s favorite book signed by his favorite author was a decent start.

She turned the book in her hands to frown at the cover.  A faceless man in a trench coat staring down a dark alley, his hand on his revolver…how cliché could it possibly be?  _Blood Runs at Midnight_ , by William Adama screamed the title, in lurid, bright letters, as though the title itself wasn’t bad enough. 

But at least there was somebody who wouldn’t have to suffer through it.

There had been a stack of Adama’s latest book on display, but Laura had wanted the book her assistant had read to her so many times in hospital rooms, and so she’d headed back to the mystery section.  As she’d scanned the A’s, locating _Blood Runs at Midnight_ with a triumphant flick of her fingers, a man had approached her, intelligent blue eyes staring out of a craggy, worn face.

_“Do you recommend this?” he’d asked._

_She took a quick peek around; no one else seemed to be listening.  “I’m told it’s his best,” she answered.  “But in all honesty, you could probably do better with another author.”_

_He raised an eyebrow.  “Not a fan?”_

_“The writing is painfully simplistic, and the plot gets worse with every chapter,” she replied.  She would never admit as much to Billy, but over the course of her treatments—finished, now, thank God—she’d come to despise even the name William Adama._

_“I’ve always feared as much,” the recipient of her literary advice admitted._

_“The hero—if you want to call him that—spends half the book whining about his failed marriage while making the same mistakes with a woman who could not more clearly be the murderer if she had the word printed on her forehead,” Laura said, with the transcendent joy of finally being able to voice something she’d long stopped herself from saying.  “Not that it would have worked out between them anyway; this guy Husker can’t get along with anybody.  Which would be one thing if he appeared to be growing or learning from his mistakes, but in the next book, there he is again: drunk and alone, mooning over some untrustworthy blonde while failing to solve the world’s most solvable murder.”_

_She stabbed her finger at the name on the cover.  “There’s alluding to a literary classic, and then there’s just rewriting it.  Read Chandler or Hammett if you must, but don’t waste your money on a wanna-be.”_

Laura smiled to herself, remembering it.  It had felt so _good_ to get it all out…so _satisfying_ …

“And he’s so handsome, too, don’t you think?” a voice behind her whispered.

Laura deeply, profoundly, doubted this.  Surreptitiously, so the women behind her wouldn’t know she was listening, she flicked to the inside back cover…

“Next!”

She stepped forward, slapping the book down on the table with a relived sigh.  “‘Happy Birthday, Billy’ if you wouldn’t—”

The man from the mystery section, seated at the signing table, under a banner that said _Award-Winning Author William Adama_ , waited patiently.

She cleared her throat.  “It’s…it’s possible I may have stated my case…a little strongly.”

He leaned back in the chair, gesturing at the book in front of him.  “Should I sign it, or will you find my rendering of ‘Happy Birthday, Billy’ to be too simplistic?”

“Or perhaps I’m only saying that because I, like my protagonist, can’t get along with anybody,” he added.

She wanted to flee.  But Billy’s birthday was in two days, and she wanted a meaty, thoughtful present more.  “In my defense, you’d have to agree that this is a fairly unbelievable plot twist,” she said, attempting a smile.

He did not return the gesture, but he did ink his name in _Blood Runs at Midnight_ before handing it back to her with a frown of displeasure she could feel in her bones.  “Then I guess you can expect to see it in my next book.”


	27. waking up alone au

The bed was cold, and empty, and it was a relief to leave it. 

He hadn't slept more than a few minutes at a time, lying awake twisting in the tangled sheets long after the sky had gone dark and then begun to lighten again.

He showered, quickly, and dropped the damp towel in the hamper, even though there was no one to mind.  He dressed, mechanically, in the last shirt in his closet he hadn't washed himself.

The coffee was weak, and bitter, and he drank it like a penance, a sacrifice to a disinterested god. 

The last time he'd made the coffee had been the morning of his wedding. 

There was a full tank of gas in the car; he hadn't dared to allow otherwise, lately.  His keys were on the table, by the door, in easy reach of sleepy eyes or panicked, fumbling fingers.  He picked up the keys.  He locked the door behind himself.  He unlocked the car and set his GPS to a location he'd only visited once before. 

He'd promised Laura he'd visit her at the hospice every day. 


	28. stuck at the office when the zombie apocalypse starts au

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How-tos borrowed from The Zombie Survival Guide, because I take my zombie AUs very seriously, you guys.

**Organize Before They Rise**

It wasn’t just this Friday night stuck at the office that grated on her, Laura told herself, lifting yet another report from the towering stack threatening to overpower her desk.  It was last Friday, and the Friday before that, and every late night and early morning and lunch hour wasted in this anonymous, airless cubicle–

A deliberate, disapproving cough from across the office interrupted her self-pity.  She didn’t have to look up from her work to know who had noticed her lapse.  Bill Adama: the man who’d held the same position in their company for ten years, whose seniority should have assured him her job…as he never overlooked an opportunity to remind her.  (There were many things Richard Adar had neglected to mention when he’d hired her eighteen months ago; that he might possibly have promised her new job to someone else was the least of them.)  Bill Adama never changed.  Nothing in her life ever changed: it was all a numbing succession of bad days, and late nights, and constant sniping from her obnoxious coworker over a job she wished she’d never taken…

She heard Richard’s door open.  She hadn’t realized he was still here, too.  Maybe she should have it out with him right now; wouldn’t that serve Bill right? To watch her throw away his coveted position, and still not get the job…it was tempting…  

She went back to her reports.  

Richard’s heavy footfalls grew closer.   _Drinking again_ , she guessed, listening to his unsteady gait.

“Good evening, Mr. Adar,” she said instead.  “Heading home?”

A hoarse, wordless moan answered her.

She looked up in concern–

Richard Adar listed gently to one side, a soft groan still escaping his slack mouth.  His skin was gray, his usually sharp gaze gone vacant and unseeing.  His pale lips were stained with crimson.  Absently, his eyes fixed on a point across the room, he raised the bloody stump of a hand–an engagement ring that Laura recognized as belonging to Richard’s secretary still clinging to one finger–to his mouth and munched casually.

Maybe she’d spoken too soon.

_This_ was new.

* * *

 

**They Feel No Fear, Why Should You**

“Bill,” Laura hissed, without taking her eyes off Richard.  He didn’t appear to have noticed her; he was still happily snacking on his former secretary.  But Laura was positive that just as in Richard’s former life, his attention now would not be an experience she’d enjoy.

Bill didn’t answer.

“Bill,” she tried again, raising her voice to just above a whisper.

Richard stopped chewing.

“Ms. Roslin, I’m very busy–” Bill intoned.

“ _Bill_ ,” she snapped.   

Richard took one shambling step towards her.

She heard Bill push his chair back in one irritable motion.  “Some of us have work to–”  He stopped short.

Laura’s gaze slipped away from Richard long enough to watch the blood drain from Bill’s face until he was nearly as pale as Richard.

“Perhaps my paperwork can wait,” Bill admitted.

* * *

 

**Keep Moving, Keep Low, Keep Quiet, Keep Alert**

“Any thoughts?” Bill inquired mildly.  

Of course Bill Adama would consider this whole situation to be _her_ responsibility.  But Laura was far too pragmatic to indulge in bickering when she was about to be turned into a cannibalistic corpse’s next meal.  

“I’m thinking we should get out of here,” Laura answered, raising her voice just loud enough to carry–

Without warning, Richard swung one heavy arm towards her.  Before she could pull away, his cold fingers clenched around her wrist.  

* * *

 

**Use Your Head, Cut Off Theirs**

Bill cursed; Laura tried without success to wiggle out of Richard’s iron grip. 

“A little help here?” she managed to gasp.

She could hear Bill slamming drawers.  A vase smashed on the floor.  “I can never even find a pen–” Bill muttered.

She was _not_ going to die here in this damn office.  She flailed behind her on her desk for something to hit Richard with.  Her fingers found the stack of abandoned reports.

“Bill–”

She swung at Richard with her paperwork.  It didn’t even slow him down.  She could feel his jaw grinding at her palm through the thin manila folder.  She could hear Bill calling out to her, his voice growing closer…but it was too late.  Richard dragged her wrist up to his mouth–

Something slammed into the side of his head.  Richard’s grip loosened, and she was able to pull her wrist away.  

It was Bill, wielding an increasingly bloody stapler.  

“I might actually prefer him this way,” he muttered, bludgeoning their former boss a second time.

Laura wanted to point out that this was easy for Bill to say–he hadn’t just been almost devoured–but chose to focus on hunting for one particular office staple, somewhere in the bottom of her desk drawer…

Her fingers closed on a smooth, thin shape, and when Bill raised his stapler a third time, and Richard staggered…she struck.

The pencil went straight through his eye, and with a soft thump, Richard crumpled to the floor.

* * *

 

**No Place Is Safe, Only Safer**

Bill and Laura stared at Richard Adar’s remains: the Number Two pencil jammed in his eye socket, the bloody gash on the side of his head, the hand still clutching a few disembodied fingers.  

Laura sank down into her desk chair, ignoring the rusty stains in the fabric.  “Should we call the police?” she wondered.

There would be no covering this up; her fingerprints were everywhere…

Bill shook his head.  “I have a feeling they’re busy.”  He pointed out the window.  Laura stepped gingerly over Richard’s body to look.  

Outside, on the street below, the same scene was playing out: people running, being chased, being eaten alive.  

Whatever had happened in this office, it was happening everywhere.

“I suppose at least we won’t go to prison,” Laura reflected.

Bill stared at her.

“I’m an optimist,” she informed him.

For the first time since they’d met, Laura saw Bill smile.

“What do you say we get out of here?” he asked.  “We could go up to the roof, stay off the streets…”

Laura reached down and delicately extracted her bloody pencil from Richard’s eye.  “I’m in,” she decided.

After all, anything had to be better than being stuck at the office.


	29. Titanic au

Laura Roslin always wanted to travel.  But when her mother falls ill on the eve of what was to have been her first cruise, Laura stays home to care for her, nursing her until her death two years later.  Then there are her younger sisters to raise–and somehow ten years pass.  But as she watches first Sandra, and then Cheryl, marry and start their own lives, she begins to think of living her own again, and she books a first-class ticket on the most beautiful ship she’s ever seen.

The morning she sets sail, she finds the lump.

* * *

 

Bill Adama never wanted to travel.  After thirty years in the Navy, civilians grate on his nerves.  But when he receives word of his son’s death in a terrible sailing accident, all Bill can think about is getting to New York to bring his boy home.

* * *

 

_I’m going to die_ , is all Laura can think, as she spends hours alone on the deck, shivering in the brisk wind, staring into the ocean she so badly wanted to cross.   _My son is dead_ , is all Bill can think, looking out into the choppy waves that were the last thing Zak saw before they closed above his head.

Beyond a polite nod in greeting, they never speak.  Neither of them are up to company.

* * *

 

Bill knows immediately when it happens and what it means.  He hasn’t spent his life on ships to not know when one is sinking beneath him.  Laura doesn’t wake until the commotion outside her cabin becomes a roar, as panicked passengers are pleading for rescue, for a way off the ship.  She isn’t an experienced sailor, but it doesn’t take long for her to grasp what’s happening: her beautiful ship is going down, and without enough lifeboats, so are most of her passengers.

Laura has never been so terrified.

But as she struggles through the crowd towards the lifeboats, she stops.  Even if she makes it off the ship…she’s dying anyway, isn’t she?  She watched her mother’s illness, her long, painful fade into death.  Is that what she wants?  To die slowly?

Laura decides she doesn’t.

* * *

 

She finds him there on the deck where they spent the voyage, never quite together.  

She expects him to try to get rid of her, to talk her out of it.  There isn’t much time–the growing tilt of the ship tells her that–and she doesn’t want to waste it arguing.

Instead, he holds out his hand.  “Bill Adama,” he says.

Her smile is grateful, and more than a little wry.  “Laura Roslin.”

She doesn’t let go of his hand.

And they wait.


	30. for all time au

She only wanted a book, something to distract her during her first chemo treatment, something to hold onto when the pain got bad.  Her assistant, Billy, had told her that there was a Barnes & Noble on this corner, close to the hospital; instead, she finds a quaint little shop, with hand-painted letters that spell out _Adama and Sons._

She goes in anyway. 

* * *

 

The shop is small, but packed with books, stacked on shelves, piled on the floor, set out on tables.  She doesn’t see the latest Grisham, or the vampire series that crowds her local bookstore.  It’s strange…she can see that many of the books are first editions, but they’re in pristine condition…and why are they being sold for so little?  She’s a teacher, not a rare book connoisseur, but even she knows a first printing of _The Stranger_ should cost more than seventy-five cents.  

* * *

 

The man behind the counter is oddly formal, wearing an immaculate, if dated, suit despite the heat.  He looks confused when she asks if he takes credit cards, and rings up her purchases with an old-fashioned cash register, wrapping her books up in thick brown paper.  But Laura can’t focus on that; her eyes are drawn to the newspaper he casually set aside, the one that’s dated July 11, 1944.

It can’t be.  But somehow…she knows it is.  

* * *

 

She comes back every week, before every treatment.  His name is Bill Adama, she learns.  One of his sons has died in the war; his other son, Lee, is missing in action.  She looks him up one night, back in her own apartment.  Leland Adama was taken as a prisoner of war; he survived, came home, and became a successful attorney.  Bill will have three granddaughters someday.

How she wishes she could tell him that.

* * *

 

“I tried to visit you in the hospital,” Bill says one day, confusion creasing his face.  “They told me you weren’t a patient there.”

As a matter of fact, Laura isn’t going to the hospital anymore.  There isn’t any point.

She smiles.  “Not anymore,” she tells him.  “I’m all better now.  You won’t be seeing me so much, now that I won’t be making trips into the city for the hospital.”

She blinks back tears as he congratulates her, real joy on his face, and gently touches his lips to hers in a bittersweet goodbye.

It’s a kinder thing for him to believe, she thinks, when she stops coming.


	31. con artist who falls in love with their mark au

It was supposed to be so simple.  Reclusive widower, his hands full of too much money to ever spend; work her way in, get her fingers on account numbers and passwords and stock holdings; disappear with new-found funds, never to be heard from again.

She’d done it before.

* * *

 

Laura Roslin (or at least, that was the name on today’s ID) might have thought her days of these unpleasant sort of games were behind her.  But after Richard (that bastard, why had she trusted him?  What had made her think she would be different?) ran off with the proceeds of last year’s Cayman Islands job, she found herself with no choice but to go back to her roots, so to speak.

She’d always had a talent for taking care of herself.

* * *

 

It was easy enough to find out Bill Adama’s favorite bar, his favorite port, to be sitting at the bar daintily sipping a glass, draped in a just-slinky-enough dress, on a night she knew he’d be there.  Easy enough to let him think he was striking up a conversation.  Easy enough to work her way into his house, his life, his bed.

* * *

 

Adama was a curmudgeon, a man used to living alone and having things his own way.  If she were planning to stay, she might have found his manner off-putting.  Instead, it was a challenge: to slip past his defenses, to become indispensable to his quiet life, to make a man who didn’t hold with sentimentality ruin himself out of love for her.

Like most things she did, she knew she’d succeed before she ever began.

* * *

 

When he offered her the ring, she should have felt triumphant.  Instead, she just felt tired.  She knew what she had to do now, what she’d always done: slip the ring on her finger, play loving fiancee for a few weeks while she worked her way through his bankers and stockbrokers, pawn the ring and buy a first-class ticket on an international flight under a different name.  She was in the home stretch now, the easy part.

But she’d grown used to her life over the past several months, to quiet dinners at home, to reading aloud curled on the softest leather sofa she’d ever known.  She’d grown accustomed to flowers on her bedside table and beautiful inscriptions penned in her books and nights that didn’t feel like an act, not anymore. 

She looked up from the ring in the box (six months rent on a penthouse apartment in another city, she knew) to the anxiety in his blue eyes, the hope on his creased face, and she hesitated.  

Would it be so terrible to really say yes?


	32. i was shrunk to four inches tall by a witch and now i kind of live in your kitchen without you knowing au

Now that he’s started seeing things, Bill Adama figures it might be time to cut back on the booze. 

But if there’s anything in the world that makes him want a drink, it’s the very tiny, very bossy woman living under his sink.  

Four inches tall, with the posture of a ballerina, the poise of a queen, and the personality of a drill sergeant, Laura—at least that’s what she calls herself—apparently came with his new apartment, although he, of course, does not discover her presence until after he’s already signed a twelve-month lease and paid his first and last months’ rent.  Two days later, he’s looking for cleaning products under the kitchen sink when he finds the space already occupied: by a miniature apartment, complete with tiny tables, tiny chairs, even a tiny refrigerator…and its even more miniature resident.

While he babbles questions—“Who are you?  What are you?   _Why_  are you?”—Laura looks merely bored.  

“When you run screaming off into the night, shut the door on your way out,” she advises, before going back to her little book.  

Instead, Bill sloshes bourbon straight up to the rim of the glass and takes his drink to bed.  

But Laura is still there in the morning. 

Bill soon learns that Laura considers the apartment her sole province, and any tenant a sort of unpaid custodian—someone to keep the place up, run her errands, and generally minister to her every whim.  

Which would be bad enough—if it weren’t for the interest she takes in his personal life. 

“Call your son,” she orders, with the off-handed imperialism of someone long accustomed to having her every command instantly obeyed. “Don’t wear that tie.  Put down the bottle; you’ve had enough. If you don’t shave that mustache, you’re not coming back through this door.  Why are avocados not on the grocery list?”

While Laura doesn’t like to talk about her past—“You throw a few peasants in the dungeon, and people get so dramatic about it,” is all she’ll say—he gathers she’s been living in the apartment for some time—decades, maybe.  

No wonder the rent is so low.  

She’s almost shockingly self-assured for someone he could literally squash like a bug, handing out the day’s orders from perched atop the coffee maker.  

“Eggs are bad for your cholesterol,” she reminds him, as he stumbles blearily into the kitchen.  "You’re switching to oatmeal.   And hurry up, you’re going to be late for work.“

She can’t make him do anything, he reminds himself, over and over again, every time he’s out of her presence.  She’s four inches tall.  Practically helpless, really.  He just has to be firm about it, tell her he’s not going to be told what to do anymore—

“Bill, I’ve told you about that tie,” she says severely, glaring at him over the top of tiny glasses.  

The thing is…

She is probably right about the tie.  


	33. zombie apocalypse au

When she sees the smoke, rising high against the pale pink early-morning sky, twisting and curling in on itself, fluttering above the treetops and floating away into the gold-edged clouds, Laura Roslin knows it in her bones: Bill Adama is dead.

It’s over.  It’s finally over.  Three years, six months, and four days after the first corpse raised itself up off the gurney and sank its teeth into the throat of the scientist who’d unwittingly given it life, the war is over.  The zombies have been defeated.  The living have won.

Laura wishes she were dead. 

* * *

 

Laura used to think that she’d seen too much death in her life.  Her mother, her sisters, her father…for a while, it seemed like her life had narrowed to one funeral after another; _ashes to ashes, dust to dust,_ as Laura stood by grave after grave, watching coffin after coffin be lowered into ground, praying—not for salvation, not for peace, but that this time, this funeral, this loss, would be the last she’d have to endure.

And then the world ended, and it turned out that death wasn’t the worst thing, after all.

Laura was in her office on the fourteenth floor of Adar, Cain, and Associates, Caprica’s finest law firm, when the panic, and then the plague, first hit Caprica City.  The streets clogging with cars, the people in them dead or dying; the bodies piling up, then rising again, in one rancid, wriggling mass; the screaming terror of those who tried to run, only to be overcome by the horde and ripped to pieces.

In the first hours of the new world, people reacted in one of two ways: they ran, and they died, or they froze, and they died.

And the herd kept growing, like a cancer, choking the life out of the streets, and then the city, and then the planet.

Laura was afraid, but she wasn’t frozen.  Some days, she felt like her whole life had been a bad dream, like she might wake up at any moment to find herself back in her old bedroom, her sisters laughing on the other side of the wall, her parents making breakfast downstairs.

It was Laura who banded the survivors together, tasked them with gathering supplies, made them feel as though they were something more than the rotting corpses massing against the walls.

She didn’t believe it herself until a stocky, thick-muscled veteran (Laura recognized the tattoos covering his arms and snaking up his neck) stood up from the group and said he knew the way to safety.

She wouldn’t find out until weeks later that the reason Bill Adama was in the building at all was that he was about to be indicted for murder.

_“It’s all a lie, isn’t it,” Laura accused him when they could snatch a moment alone, keeping her voice low, so the others wouldn’t overhear.  "There’s no safety left, and you know it.“_

_He didn’t try to deny it.  ”But if we stay here, we’ll all die.  These people need to believe that there’s something on the other side, or they’ll all just lie down and quit.”_

And so Laura kept his secret, and she repeated his lie, and together, they led fifty people out of the ruins of Caprica City.

They slept on the ground and ate grasses and berries and stayed on the move, constantly, dodging and running and hiding from the bloated corpses that hungered for them, day and night.  They scavenged abandoned buildings for knives, picked guns off the dead, fashioned spears out of sharpened sticks.

And they learned to burn the dead, before they rose again.

Laura, who had never held a weapon before in her life, learned how to sight along the barrel of a rifle, how to angle a knife into a decomposing skull, how to kill or be killed.

One night, their camp was set upon by the horde, and their group was forced to scatter into the night, leaving six people and most of their supplies behind.

_“We can’t just abandon them,” Bill argued, the corded muscles of his arms twitching for action._

_“We don’t go back,” Laura whispered, her hand on Bill’s arm, holding him still.  "We only go forward.“_

Seven months later, when a raid on a farmhouse went bad and Laura got trapped up in the loft of a burning barn, zombies moaning beneath her, flames rising above her, Laura thought of that conversation, and as the smoke stung her eyes and filled her lungs, she knew no one was coming back for her.

It was what she wanted, after all.

Bill came after her anyway.

_"Why?” she choked out, coughing lungfuls of smoke against his shoulder when they finally stopped running._

_He shrugged, and she didn’t think he was going to answer._

_“I can’t do this without you,” he said at last._

When they found the hospital, with its high fences—abandoned except for two doctors, Baltar and Cottle, who hadn’t quite given up hope of discovering a cure—Laura dared to imagine that her life could be something other than terror and hunger and despair.

_“Maybe we should just enjoy this,” Laura whispered to Bill, nestled together on a narrow hospital cot, the first real bed they had ever shared._

_He smiled.  ”I am.”_

For six months, their group almost lived like people, as Cottle and Baltar tried drug after drug on the horde that pounded against the high fence.

Nothing worked—probably nothing ever would—but it was something, to have hope again.

And then the raiders came.

Zarek and his gang didn’t even give them the chance to negotiate, or even to surrender—they just quietly cut the fences and let the zombies do the rest.

Only sixteen of their group escaped.

Bill wasn’t one of them.

Laura couldn’t bring herself to believe that he was dead.

She knew that if he were in her place, he would wait for her.

But Laura had sixteen people counting on her, and she couldn’t afford to indulge her personal feelings.

Wherever Bill was, she hoped that he understood that.

But with every mile that they put behind them, her steps grew heavier, until she couldn’t bring herself to take another.

_“You’re what?” Lee demanded, astonished, when she told him she was going back.  “Why?”_

_“Because I can’t live without him,” she said simply._

She turned, and walked off into the night alone.

When sun came out and revealed Bill coming through the trees, she realized that she’d never really believed she’d see him again.

And then her vision was blurring and he was crushing her to his chest and nothing else mattered anymore.

_“Why?” he whispered, his face buried in her hair._

_She smiled, even as tears tracked down the dust and grime caked on her face.  “I can’t do this without you.”_

When she and Bill made it back to the group, Lee told her that Baltar and Cottle had come up with a possible cure—and Laura was afraid.

She should have known it was too good to last.

 _“I don’t want you to worry about m_ e _,” she whispered, burying her face in the bristly strands of his hair, trying to memorize his scent, save it up for the long, empty days and nights ahead of her.  ”I know what you have to do.”_

_“I just need to get Cottle and Baltar close enough to the horde to distribute the cure,” he reminded her, the desperate grip of his hands on her back betraying his worry.  “If it works the way they think it will, the anti-virus should spread quickly—and then this whole thing will finally be over, and we’ll all be safe.”_

_Laura didn’t say what she knew: that getting close enough to the herd to infect them was a death sentence._

_“Of course,” Laura agreed.  She released him.  “I’ll see you then.”_

_She didn’t tell him she loved him.  Maybe he knew, maybe he didn’t—but she knew hearing it would only make what he had to do harder._

_After all, Laura was an expert in goodbyes._

She watched him disappear into the distance, the precious satchel containing the cure slung over his shoulder, taking all of her hope with him.

And then Zarek came back.

If they hadn’t been divided, if they hadn’t been distracted…but Boomer and the Chief were dead before Laura even knew what was happening.

And then the gun was in her hand and she was firing off round after round into Zarek’s skull.

Later, when Lee and Ellen pulled her off his body, her hands were covered in blood, and what she was driving her knife into didn’t even resemble a person anymore.

It didn’t bring her people back.

* * *

 

The zombies have been falling for hours, stopping in their tracks and crumbling to the ground, twitching, and then finally going still.  It’s a revelation, it’s a miracle, it’s everything they’ve ever hoped for and more—but Laura can’t help but wish…

She waits alone, shivering in the cold, as the sun rises higher and the breeze carries the smoke away. 

She can’t bear to watch the others celebrate, not now.

When Baltar stumbles up over the hill, she tries to be grateful that one of them has survived.

When Cottle staggers back to camp, Laura turns away. 

She knows, now, whose body was on that fire.

She starts walking, taking step after step, her legs moving forward where her mind cannot.  She can’t go back.  She can’t stop moving.  She’s not even sure how she’s still breathing.

Maybe she’ll just keep walking, until cold and exhaustion cover her like blanket.

And then she hears the voice behind her.

“We don’t go back, remember?”

Tears burn her eyes and her heartbeat pounds in her ears and she’s moving so fast that when he catches her in his arms, they both hit the ground in one sobbing, laughing, joyous heap. 

“The fire—” Laura gasps.  “I thought—”

Bill cuts her off, his mouth on hers, like he can’t get enough of her, of them, of this new world.

There will never be enough.

When he raises his right arm, at first Laura doesn’t understand.  When she sees the stump in the place of his hand, her eyes flood with fresh tears.

“I got bitten,” Bill murmurs against her neck.  “As we spread the cure.  I couldn’t risk—”

“They had to cauterize the bleeding,” Laura whispers, her joy colder now.  “Bill—”

He’s busy pressing tiny kisses against her forehead, her cheeks, her throat.  “It doesn’t matter,” he says at last.  “We’re safe.  We’re together.  I can do without—”

“I love you,” Laura interrupts.  The world has ended and begun anew and she can’t wait another moment.  Not when the dead are finally dead and she and Bill have so much life ahead of them.

Bill’s good arm tightens around her.  “About time,” he whispers.

On this day, on this morning, it is.


	34. rival art teachers at the community center au

More than any other place on earth, Bill Adama loves the community center.

He grew up there, spending his summers in drawing and painting classes, his afternoons and evenings first attending the center’s after-school camps, and then later running them for the younger kids.  It was an escape for him, from his family (rough) and his neighborhood (rougher).  Part of a company town, it had never been prosperous, but it used to be a decent place to live—until the factory closed down when Bill was eight, leaving most of the adults out of work, the bank foreclosing on their homes, evicting families who had lived in the neighborhood for generations.  

Unlike most of the kids he grew up with, Bill managed to get out, go to college—but when he graduated, he came back, to work as an art teacher in his old high school and teach classes at the community center during summers, determined to provide the same safe, nurturing environment that had saved him.

He wanted to help his students the way that he was helped, wanted to be a part of changing his hometown for the better, making it the place he still remembered, still believed it could be.

As the years go by, though, attendance at the center dwindles, and as more and more of his kids drop out of school, or end up on the streets, or in jail, Bill’s losing heart.  Can he help anyone, anymore?  Has he  _ever_  helped anyone?

And then Laura Roslin, internationally renowned, award-winning artist, signs up to teach classes that summer, free to anyone who wants to take them.

Her classes fill up in days.

* * *

Small children  _love_  Laura Roslin, love to crowd around her when she walks through the door, pointing at their pictures with stubby, Crayola-stained fingers.  Teenagers adore her, too: her edgy music she plays too loud during class, her splashily foul language, her endless anecdotes of gallery openings and parties and celebrity encounters.  She’s even a hit in her adult classes, too: the way she lets her students work as slowly as they want, without caring if a drawing takes an entire summer to finish; the way she never raises an eyebrow when they’re late, or distracted, or absent for weeks; the way she listens so carefully to their stories of bosses and kids and partners and parking tickets.  She’s the most popular teacher the community center has ever seen.

Bill Adama hates her. 

On principle, at first: the big-time artist, deigning to slum it for a few months, then slide gratefully back into her fancy life, full up on the good deed she did for one summer.  They don’t need her charity.  They don’t need  _her_.  

But the community center’s full for the first time in years.

Bill’s classes are not.

He tries not to hold it against her…until he gets to know her, and learns better reasons to hate her.

She smokes.  (Outside the building, but still).  She talks too much.  And, worst of all…she acts like they could be friends, like they’re on the same side.

“Kara’s looking a little rough today,” she tells him one afternoon when they meet in the tiny staff room over a lukewarm pot of coffee.

Bill has known Kara Thrace since she was six years old.  He knows what she faces at home, knows how hard she works to keep it from showing.

“I know,” he says curtly.

“I just came from the activities director’s office,” she tells him another day when they meet in the hallway, her hand on her hip, her voice indignant.  "The whole place reeks of booze, and he’s passed out at his desk at three in the afternoon.  What kind of example is that for the kids?“

Saul Tigh hasn’t been the same since he came back from the war.  But Laura wouldn’t know that.

“Not your problem,” Bill growls, brushing past her before she can get another word out.

She’ll be gone at the end of the summer, Bill tells himself.  He can be civil until then.

And then Kara and Lee come to him one sweltering July day and tell him that Laura Roslin’s organizing an art show benefit to raise money for scholarships, and she wants his help.

Looking at their flushed, hopeful faces, Bill can’t say no…as much as he fears getting their hopes up, risking their disappointment.  Their problems can’t be fixed by a party and a few bucks…but of course, Laura wouldn’t understand that, either.

It is as bad as he’d thought it would be, working with her, from her naïveté to the cigarette ash she drops all over his papers.  But as they organize artwork and catalogue entries, as she persuades business after business to grant them time, space, money, services…he can’t help but develop a grudging respect for her.  She’s certainly determined to make a difference for his kids.

Even if she doesn’t really know what they need.

Even if by September, she doesn’t remember any of them at all.

They’ll never be friends.  But as the weeks pass, he’s finding it almost… _painless_  to talk to her, to share in her dry wit, her self-deprecating humor, her sly observations about the world around them.

He won’t miss her when she leaves, of course.  But he might… _notice_.

And then one August afternoon he walks into his classroom to find Laura bent over his desk, flipping through his personal sketchbook.

“Bill, these are  _beautiful_ ,” she whispers, paging past charcoals of students, teachers, parents.  ”Why haven’t I seen these exhibited anywhere?  I could call my agent, have her come down—”

He grabs for his sketchbook, his face growing hot, before she can get to the sketches he’s done of her.  ”That would make you happy, wouldn’t it?” he growls.  ”Swoop in here and fix me, too?  Well, I’m not one of your scholarship kids, and I’m not your charity case.  I had a good life here before you showed up, and it’ll be that way again once you’ve left.”

He expects her to snap back at him.  Instead, she lets go of the notebook and walks out of the room.

He storms into Saul’s office to complain.

“She thinks we’re all just one big community service project,” he rants. “She doesn’t know anything about this town, or those kids, or me—”

“How’s the benefit coming?” Saul mumbles, his head pillowed in his arms.

“It’s a waste of time,” Bill spits out.  "Does she have any idea how much tuition costs?  Books?  Room and board?  How money she’d have to raise to cover even a fraction of what those kids would need?  Or how complicated their lives are—who’s going to watch Felix’s little brother if he’s gone?  Who’s going to feed Sharon’s family if she’s not working?  Most of these kids will be lucky to even graduate high school, but is she thinking about that?  No, she’s just thinking of how good it’ll feel for her, to think she did something—and then she’ll move on, and I’ll be left here to clean up their disappointment.“

And then, out of the corner of his eye,  he glimpses movement, a flash of red hair, through the crack of Saul’s door, left open—just a crack—in his irritation…and he knows, with an unfamiliar sinking of shame deep in his gut, that Laura heard everything.

They don’t speak again until the night of the benefit.

* * *

He’s never seen his kids so excited as when they walk into that beautiful space and see their artwork hanging on the walls.  

(Laura was right about the venue, it turns out.  About the lighting, about the catering, about…everything.)

Even if they don’t make a cent, the looks on Lee and Kara and Dee’s faces tell him that something important has happened here tonight.

Except they do make money.  

Laura’s there, moving through the crowd, her black dress fluttering around her, as she congratulates students, chats with parents and friends, talks up potential donors.  When she thanks everyone for coming, she calls the benefit “a collaboration between myself and community institution Bill Adama,” and when she leads the applause in his direction, he can’t quite meet her eyes.

Maybe…maybe he could have tried a little harder, with her.

They’re still counting the money, but so far they’ve raked in thousands of dollars, and the kids are beside themselves with pride…and he can’t find Laura.

He’s about to give up when he spies her through the window, standing outside and looking in, a sadness on her face that takes his breath away.

And then she sees him, and her face smooths out, leaving him wondering if he imagined it, if it was just a trick of the light.

He finds her in the parking lot.

She flashes a sardonic smile and drops her cigarette to the ground, grinding it out beneath one delicate shoe.  ”I know.  No smoking around the kids.  It’s out.”

"About the other day..” he begins.

She holds up a hand.  ”I shouldn’t have been in your things.  It was my mistake.”  She pauses, and he knows she has already practiced this next part.  ”I didn’t come here to save anyone, and certainly not you.  I’m sorry if it seemed that way.”

He should let it go, but he can’t.  ”Of course you did,” he snaps.  ”Of course you did.  Why else would you be here?”

He expects her to walk away again.  

Instead, she looks back through the window.  

“I was adopted when I was two,” she says at last.  Did you know that?“

He does, actually.  ”By a diplomat and his wife.”  Of course she was, he’d thought when he’d heard.  Of course, of all the kids languishing in orphanages and foster homes, pretty little Laura Roslin would get plucked out of the system and landed in the lap of luxury.

Laura nods.  ”She died eight months later.”

That, he hadn’t known.  ”I’m sorry.”

She shrugs.  ”I don’t remember her.  But my father, who worked twenty hour days and moved every two years, was suddenly left alone with this little girl.  Me.”  She pauses.  ”I was very lucky.  I went to excellent schools.  I traveled the world.  I always had food and warmth and a roof over my head.  I just..”  She trails off. “I really envy what you have here, you know.  This community where you were born, where you grew up, where you  _belong_ …”

Her fingers fidget with her pack of cigarettes, the paper crinkling.  ”When my father died last year, I started looking into my adoption.  There aren’t any records on my birth parents, but I was born in this hospital.  I thought..”

He understands, now, and it throws him.  ”You wanted to come home.”

She winces.  ”It sounds particularly stupid that way.  Early midlife crisis, maybe.”  She lights a cigarette, and he doesn’t stop her.  ”You want to know the worst part?  Some days, with those kids—it almost felt like I had.”

Never, not once, did it occur to him that she could have had any other motives for coming here besides a good story to tell in interviews and a smug feeling to take back to her penthouse.  

He doesn’t know how to say he’s sorry.  

"Don’t worry,” she says, not looking at him.  "I won’t be staying.  You were right.  I don’t belong here.“

"Laura..”

Then Kara comes running out the door.  ”Felix finished counting,” she says gleefully.  ”You have to come in, you have to see—”

“Just a minute,” he manages.

When he turns around, Laura is already gone.

* * *

“What’s wrong with Mr. Adama?” Sharon whispers during third period studio art one Friday in October.  "He’s never been this cranky.“

"He’s still moping about Laura,” Kara stage-whispers back.  "He had a crush on her, and she left town anyway.“

Bill, busy helping Dee with her butterfly sculpture, pretends not to hear.

Lee frowns.  ”But that was months ago,” he says in an undertone.  ”Shouldn’t he be over it by now?”

"He didn’t realize he liked her until after she left,” Kara informs him.

“Kara,” Bill scolds.  "Back to work, please.“

Kara subsides, holding up her hands, a helpless, what-can-you-do gesture to the rest of the class.

He wishes it were that simple.

Laura left at the end of August, when her classes finished up and her lease ran out.  After the benefit, he kept thinking he would find a moment to talk to her, to tell her she should reconsider…but there were always too many people around, too many eager students, too many last-minute finishing touches, and the moment never came, and then it was too late.

It occurred to him, after she’d gone, that he’d never really seen any of her work.  He looked it up online, late one night when he couldn’t sleep.  He’d written her off as another overrated, overhyped pretender; all pretension, no substance.  But her paintings…they’re abstract, yes, but the emotion in them…the raw grief in her spirals, the stark loneliness in her lines…

He’d never seen anything like it in his life.

He wishes he could talk to her.

The kids still do; he’s always hearing about an email to Dee, or a text to Kara, or a trip she’s organizing to take everyone to a museum…but never any mention of any plans to come back.

Maybe she’s caught up in her old life again.  Maybe she doesn’t remember him at all.

Maybe he misses her.

Maybe it’s too late.


	35. medusa/hero au

The Underworld: a dim, dank hollow, the air heavy and rank with a damp wetness that chills to the bone, and the place where our story begins.

Or maybe that’s not quite right.  Maybe it starts with the words  _I’m no hero, but I want my son back_.  Maybe it begins with a nosedive in a small plane, or a boy with dark hair and a wide smile climbing into a cockpit.  Maybe it begins with Helo and Kat taking too long in the showers, leaving an empty locker room where Kara Thrace kisses Zak Adama for the first time, his back pressed up against the metal, the hard ridge of the door digging into his spine, his hands coming up to cup her face.

Maybe it begins on the floor of a temple, in a time too long ago to remember, and a thing so shrouded in myth and mystery and legend that it might as well never have happened.

Maybe it begins with a little boy with blue eyes sitting on his grandmother’s bed, listening to an old woman’s stories of gods who weren’t myth, or metaphor, but ancient forces, still capable of doing harm or malice at the tiniest slight, still powerful enough to intercede in the lives of mortals…for a price.

Maybe it begins with the bright, cold morning after they put his boy in the ground, when Bill Adama hiked up a mountain outside his grandmother’s Tauron village and told the priestess of the Oracle that he wasn’t leaving until the gods consented to trade his life for his son’s.

* * *

 

_“I’m not here for prophecies or futures or games,” Bill said flatly, waving away her offer of a reading.  The swirling smoke of sacrificial incense burning inside the shrine hurt his eyes, and his muscles still protested the effort of the long climb, the dull ache of his old knee injury from the war freshly painful.  He wanted this over with, done, the die irrevocably cast, the ink on the contract dry.  “Can you help me with that, or not?”_

_The priestess brushed her golden hair back off her shoulders.  “I have my ways,” she smiled, something cruel and hard in her beautiful eyes.  She tilted her head up, and suddenly they were white, empty of color, of pupils, of any trace of humanity.  When she spoke, her voice wasn’t her own._

_“Your sacrifice is rejected,” a deep voice rumbled, the horrible sound tearing from the priestess’s pale throat, but also forming in the air, the smoke, the rock beneath them.  “The gods do not crave an old man’s death.”_

_“I’ll do anything,” Bill protested, hands forming useless fists at his side, ready to fight something that wasn’t there, something he didn’t even believe in._

_A terrible laugh echoed through the chamber.  “And what do you have to offer, old man?”_

_“Anything,” Bill promised.  “Anything it takes to buy back my son’s life.”_

_“A life for a life, but not yours,” the voice thundered.  “Bring back the head of Medusa, and the Underworld might be convinced to release your son.”_

_It wasn’t a guarantee, and Bill wasn’t a hero, just a retired commander living his last days in a one-room apartment off a small pension.  But it was more than a lifelong atheist could have hoped for, and he wasn’t going to turn it down._

_“We have a deal,” Bill declared, with more certainty than his old bones felt._

_The laughter, cruel and amused, chased him as he fled the chamber, the mountain, the village._

* * *

 

Maybe the story begins outside the dingy green door of an anonymous fourth-floor Caprica City walk-up, as Bill tries to decide if heroes are meant to knock, or kick in the lock, or if the act of wondering itself indicates how ill-prepared he is for this moment, how unsuited for a quest of this magnitude he truly is.

He is saved from the decision by a soft voice, calling from inside.  “It’s unlocked.”

This information alleviates none of his doubts, but decades in the military still makes him itch at inaction, and so he pushes himself forward, and into a small, well-decorated apartment, the walls lined with bookshelves, the floors covered in thick, bright rugs.

It is more of a home than his studio ever will be, and he hopes, in that moment, that his information is wrong, his search at another dead end.

Then his eyes settle on the woman seated on a soft leather sofa, and he knows, commingled dread and hope pounding against his rib cage, that he has found the gorgon.

She’s a slight woman, pale, with dark glasses covering her eyes and dark, shoulder-length hair that could only be a wig covering her head.  Her hands are folded neatly in her lap; one high heel dangles off crossed legs.  

“Shouldn’t you have brought a shield?”

“I beg your pardon?” he says, caught off guard—somehow, he hadn’t expected the monster he’d come to slay to make conversation, or collect antique rugs, or have a copy of his favorite book on her mantle.

She sighs.  “You’ve come to hunt the terrible monster Medusa,” she says, tonelessly, the words long ago become rote, “for love or money or glory, although….”  She tilts her head, and he gets the feeling she’s squinting at him through her dark lenses.  “Aren’t you a little old for heroics?”

“I’m quite a bit younger than you are,” he can’t help but point out.

She waves a hand.  “That’s not saying much, I’m afraid.”  

She makes no move towards him, and old habit makes him want to keep her talking, as he waits for an opening, an opportunity.  “Why the…” he gestures at her head.

He can’t see, but he has the distinct impression she’s rolling her eyes.  “I can’t turn every delivery boy to stone, or the hallway would be full of them,” she explains patiently, as though she’s talking to a child.  “And the wig is for my neighbor Billy; he's a sweet boy who runs my errands, and I’d hate to have one of my snakes accidentally bite him, or worse, scare him, so I’d have to hire someone else.”

She uncrosses her legs.  “So are you going to challenge me to a duel, or do you have some clever plan in the works?”

He has his pistol from the war, and an aching void in his chest that reminds him that it doesn’t matter if he leaves this place or not.  “What would you recommend?”

Her lips curl into a wry smile.  “I’d recommend that you leave a lady in peace, but I doubt my advice will weigh very heavily against your dreams of fame and fortune.”

His knee hurts, and he wonders if could sit down, if standing offers him even the slightest advantage over the woman (or monster, or whatever she is) who still has not moved from the couch.

“It’s my son,” he admits, sinking carefully into a chair opposite her.  “He’s dead.  I made a deal.  His life for your head.”

She sighs.  “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”

“I’m sorry,” he says freely.  “You’ve done nothing to me.  But it’s my son.  I have to save him.”

“You know, even if you succeed here, they will more than likely keep your boy,” she says, a hint of bitterness creeping into her soft voice.  “The gods can be cruel without reason.”

He remembers the horrible laugh, and he knows that she is right, even as he knows that he can’t give up and leave here without trying.

“So what would you do?” he asks.  “If you were me.”

Her hand reaches up, and he tenses—she is removing her sunglasses, and he will die here, turned to stone, an old man sitting in a chair, a monument to hopelessness and futility, and Zak will rot in the Underworld forever—but instead she just adjusts her wig.

“I suppose,” she says thoughtfully, “I might ask a lady if she were interested in making a new deal.”


	37. hgtv au ii

_You step out of your house, and onto your dock…a morning swim…sunsets and sails..this is lake-front living.  And it’s only for the rich…or so you thought!_  chirped the opening sequence of the show that paid Laura’s rent at an apartment she barely slept in, the food that rotted in her fridge while she was traveling with her crew, and her therapy bills for the weekly phone sessions that stopped her, just about, from running screaming into the scenic woods of whatever body of water she was filming today, never to be seen from again.

Privately, Laura had always felt that anybody who had a few hundred dollars loose change lying around to blow on a secondary residence  _was_  rich, but in her five years as producer of Lakefront Bargain Hunt, HGTV still had yet to respond to her requests for a change in voiceover intro.  Cheap bastards.

She looked over the top of the camera, assessing the shot.  The setting was perfect: a cloudless blue sky, sun warm (but not so bright as to induce squinting), the clear waters of Lake Gaston glimmering invitingly behind her buyers.  Today’s victim didn’t fit the profile Laura had come to expect in her half a decade in televised real estate sales.  Bill Adama wasn’t a young married, a wide-eyed blonde on his arm, two cherubic toddlers frolicking underfoot; he was a hard-faced, unsmiling retiree, a career military man whose decidedly non-adorable adult son stood (an uncharitable viewer might say sulking) a deliberate distance from his father, arms crossed.

“ _Cut_ ,” Laura called, to the groans of Helo, the cameraman.  (Helo had a brand-new baby at home he barely got to see, as he complained at every opportunity.  Laura didn’t blame him, but she did wish his domestic bliss didn’t remind her so vividly of the empty hotel room and suitcase full of ramen that awaited her at the end of the day’s shoot.)

“I’m sorry,” she told Bill and Lee, her tight smile indicating that in fact she was the one due an apology, “but I’m going to need you two to get a little closer.”

The two, identically perturbed by this, apparently, glowered at her as though she’d suggested they strip down and then drape themselves in poisonous vipers.

It was going to be an unbearably long shoot, Laura could tell that already.

“I need you both to fit in the camera frame,” she explained patiently, the way she’d worked through these things back with her film students at NYU, before she’d slept with her department chair, lost her reputation—and then her tenure—and decamped for the unsullied if somewhat grubby waters of television.  

Bill and Lee drew closer, each with the speed and enthusiasm of someone approaching radioactive waste.  

At least, Laura reminded herself, there were no screaming children on set today.

She settled back behind the camera, and signaled to Helo.

“I want to buy a cabin on the lake,” Bill said simply, with about a tenth of the enthusiasm she needed.  In person he was quiet; on screen he’d look dead.  But he was finally talking…maybe it’d be better to let him warm up, and edit later…

“I have a little money saved, plus my pension,” he continued, glancing uncomfortably at the camera.  “I don’t need anything fancy.  Just a little place for myself and my books.”

He trailed off.  Apparently that was all he had to say on the subject.  Laura could feel a migraine beginning to throb behind her right eye.

“Anything you’re particularly hoping for in a home?” she prompted.  “A third bedroom?  A second bathroom?”

Bill shrugged.  “I’d rather not.  I spent my life on ships; a big place just wouldn't feel like home.”

Of course it wouldn’t.

Lee snorted, loudly, as though this statement had been designed to personally offend him.  (Perhaps it had.  Laura, thank what was left of her luck, did not know these people.)

(Billy had vetted this man, vouched for him, said he would make a nice change from their typical young families and aggressively outdoorsy couples.  Laura loved her assistant, but she was going to stab him right in his too-big heart for this.)

“What about the view?” she suggested, trying a different tack.  “You want to see the lake from every room, right?”

That was a gimme; everybody wanted that.  Bill just had to mouth it back at her.

He tilted his head.  “Is that even possible?  Wouldn’t the cabin have to be in the middle of the lake?  Or possibly floating above it?”

In the ten years since Laura had quit smoking, she had never wanted a cigarette so badly as she did now, standing on the beatific shores of a North Carolina lake, sunlight dappling the waters, birds chirping, as this jackass who should never have gotten before a camera asked the same question she’d been wondering for years.

“What about amenities?” Laura forced out between her teeth.  “Stainless steel appliances?  A boat lift?  A hot tub?”

Bill pondered this.  “No,” he said.  “I don’t cook much, or own a boat.  That stuff would just take up space.”

Laura took a deep breath in through her nose, out through her mouth (“Smell the flowers, blow out the candles,” her therapist, Elosha, had coached), stepped—not stomped—towards the Adamas, and quietly—not shrilly—asked Bill if he’d “just step into the house to talk.”

It was the first home they had picked out for their buyers to look at; it had three bathrooms, a wet bar, and its own pool, and it made Laura existentially queasy.

“Is there something wrong?” Bill ventured.

Freed from the prying eyes of her crew, she could tell him.

“What show have you been watching?” Laura demanded.  “This is Lakefront Bargain Hunt.  Everyone who has ever stepped foot in front of that camera wants lake adjacent property with outdoor space for entertaining and an ensuite bathroom and hardwood floors and fucking  _granite countertops—_ ”

Bill coughed.  “I’ve actually never watched your show.”

After five years, Laura still preferred to think of it as ‘the show that employed her temporarily, while she figured some things out’ rather than the more damning ‘her show.’  Hearing it out loud, Laura wanted to hurl herself into the water, the camera tied to her ankles.

She braced a hand against the inevitable white kitchen cabinets.  “Then why—”

“My…my ex-daughter-in-law signed me up,” he admitted, looking, finally, almost embarrassed.  “Sent in a tape without me knowing.  It’s been hard, for both of us, since my son Zak died…and she was so excited when I got picked…she called Lee and made him come out here; we haven’t spoken in months…”

She should call off the shoot right here and now, that was what she should do.  She should send Helo home to his family and Tory back to her complicated romantic entanglements and leave Billy an aggrieved voicemail and…

“I tell you what,” she heard herself say.  “I’ll tell you what to say, and you say it, and we’ll make it a good episode for her, okay?”

Bill’s worn face relaxed into a cautious smile.  “I would appreciate that.”

“All right,” she said, grabbing a pencil from her bun, “I need you to talk up  _second bedroom_  and  _storage space_  and  _authentic cabin feel_.  Do you have any opinions on knotty pine, because—“

“What do you get out of this?” Bill interrupted, taking off his glasses to look at her.  She hadn’t noticed until now, in this kitchen, under the updated recessed lighting, how  _blue_  his eyes were…

“There have to be people clamoring to be on your show,” he said.  “Why bother with me?”

She shrugged.  She wasn’t sure herself, honestly, except…“Maybe, if you ever do find that nice quiet cabin by the lake…you’ll invite me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> intro and identifying features borrowed with the affection of someone who has seen every goddamn episode. I LOVE YOU, HGTV!


End file.
